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PC Makers In Desperate Need of a Reboot
nmpost writes in with a story about how hard it is to be a successful PC company in today's world. "Hewlett-Packard Co. used to be known as a place where innovative thinkers flocked to work on great ideas that opened new frontiers in technology. These days, HP is looking behind the times. Coming off a five-year stretch of miscalculations, HP is in such desperate need of a reboot that many investors have written off its chances of a comeback. Consider this: Since Apple Inc. shifted the direction of computing with the release of the iPhone in June 2007, HP's market value has plunged by 60 percent to $35 billion. During that time, HP has spent more than $40 billion on dozens of acquisitions that have largely turned out to be duds so far. HP might have been unchallenged for the ignominious title as technology's most troubled company if not for one its biggest rivals, Dell Inc. Like HP, Dell missed the trends that have turned selling PCs into one of technology's least profitable and slowest growing niches. As a result, Dell's market value has also plummeted by 60 percent, to about $20 billion, since the iPhone's release."
A large portion of the reasons for Dell's collapse was because they were caught lying about their accounting.
Boot... Micro$oft
Why do you constantly make new "noh8rz" accounts when your karma gets too low? What's the game?
And when HP wanted to purge itself o the 'PC Maker' part of their business to do a reboot the shareholders revolted.
Feed all the MBAs to the paper shredder.
That was before they sold off much of the good stuff, and spun the last of it off as Agilent. Today's HP is HP only in name.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Do you want your PC manufacturer to be expensive and a high stock price, or reasonably priced but worth "only" 20 billion?
There's no problem here. Move along.
You can't rest on your laurels and think you can keep making the same profits you used to in the "beige box" era of PCs. The only PC maker I can think of that's actually interesting is the one I bought my last system from: iBUYPOWER. But they're specialized, making gaming systems for a specific type of user.
"since the iphone release"
Um... that is just stupid.
"PC Makers"? Ha. They're middle men. Integetrators of other people's products. They "make" nothing. It was inevitable that they would get squeezed out until the last man that can survive on the smallest margin is left standing. All the ultrabooks and "surface"s in the world won't change the fact that Windows computers are a commodity and always will be until MS tells the OEMs to take a hike and put them all out of business.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
Start with NOT including bloatware.
I interviewed with them in 1999. Back then they seemed like an excellent company, with a campus that reminded me of college (lots of small buildings interconnected by pathways).
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
How about resurrecting the VBI project?
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
But those of us who actually buy a lot of computer love Dell. Easy to work with, good quality/price balance. Wouldn't touch HP with a 10 foot pole. Of course, I keep a 100 ft pole around for both Sun and IBM. (no penis jokes please. Okay, maybe a few.)
HP and Dell are the Nokia and RIM of the computer world. Has beens.
Face it, folks, the gig's up:
Coming: 1. Then end of general purpose computing. 2. "Secure" computing (Palladium-style) 3. Only approved programs via "app stores"
Apple has been too successful. They've got $100bil in the bank, and growing. All the other computer makers are in the doldrums, and are could come to the verge of bankruptcy just by making some more bad decisions.
It just won a billion dollar settlement which is the beginning of their campaign to obliterate choice in tech.
"Normal" people have been completely brainwashed, and it's doubtful we could explain anything in a way that would make them desire tech freedom. When there was just a chance that Saint Apple's holy iDevices might have to pay for the use of some Google patents, US Senators actually held hearings for poor old Apple.
Buy a couple extra laptops. You'll look on them like you do your C64 now.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Fewer MBAs, more engineers.
You're supposed to be a tech company. Where are the tech advances? Where's the engineering? Why are your products almost indistinguishable from Dell's?
Most consumers want little portable devices and media consumption displays, not general purpose computers.
Sure there are some , but this isn't the 90's where *everyone* wanted a desktop ( or 2 ). And those that do still want them, mostly now realize that last years model is good enough to not to fork out for a new one just because its shiny and the marketing people say they want to..
Sorry folks, its 2012, time to adapt, or stick to the business markets.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Hp just has to make the rest of its PC's like its z series workstation.s we use the z series workstations at work and they rock. All hp has to do is make their home pc's like ther do their business pc's Also they need to advertise their switches more.
Remember when Carli Fiorina was in charge at HP? She seemed to have a good vision
I'm sorry, what? I had to re-read that a few times... Really? Carli Fiorina had a good vision for HP? Wow. Simply wow...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
What device did you type this long, goofy post out on?
The market has been saturated already, and people can't see the need to upgrade every 2 years.
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
Yeah, because the hardware manufacturers who've bedded with Linux have done so much better...
Oh, wait....
Of course they did this, they outsourced their soul when they thought their companies were nothing but machines with parts that could be replaced with parts from the cheapest provider. Once they did that they lost their soul and they lost their innovation. Nobody had a desire to take pride in their company anymore knowing that they could well be the next to replaced with someone in India next.
It was the rank and file of the old HP, Dell, Compaq etc that were so damn innovative that built the industry. Upper management came along and thought they could outsource them and still get the same results, failing to see how people would no longer /care/. People who are focused on surviving simply don't give a damn and the next thing you know companies like Acer and Samsung rise from being providers to the giants to the next giants themselves.
Here's the thing, if they do the same thing the American companies did, they too will fall and someone else will take their place. Seriously, can anyone ever give me a single example of where outsourcing actually worked out in the long term for someone other than the vendor?
Both Dell and HP are making billions. They mostly cater to the business sector. I mean sure Apple has a 25% profit margin, which is insanely high for a hardware company. Most of that is from iPhone and iPad, and those items come and go based on the whims of consumer taste. 10 years, 20 years is a long time in the computer industry; companies rise and fall during those times. Anything can happen. 15 years ago, Apple was nearly bankrupt, and now they're the most valuable company by market cap. IBM was taking massive losses nearly 20 years ago, now they're the 3rd largest tech company. In the meantime, Compaq is gone, DEC is gone, Wang is gone, etc. HP and Dell have been reinventing themselves, and they're closer to what IBM looks like rather than Apple.
Let's face it, 90% of the consumer market does not feel the burning need to upgrade.
A cpu/mb/ram combo from 4-5 years ago, can still run Windows 7 comparably well. For browsing, e-mail, doing your taxes, and playing media, most machines are there will be okay for a while.
So people are doing to buy a new computer just like they would buy a new TV, microwave, or fridge. Only when they have to.
On the Enterprise market, as companies shift to 5 year cycles for the OS, they may choose to keep the HW stable as well. I see a trend in the large orgs that I work with to lease the computer, and purchase the monitor (which lasts usually longer and less prone to failure). 3 year leases are turning into 4 year lease plans, and even I have one 10,000+ purchasing HW on five year cycles.
And now for the cool market of gamers, media creators, Linux OS users and coders. Yes, they may upgrade every year or so, yet they're in the minority.
I'm personally shocked how many of my friends/acquaintences are dumping $2-3k to get one of those fancy Apple 27" computers because of how cool it looks on their bloody granite kitchen counter. And HP won't have a chance there.
Small footprint computers, media center systems, and tablets would be my guess on the consumer computer devices that will be the ones selling more.
I wish dell would have built something as durable as a Nokia in their time though...
I got here through a series of tubes
Noob. He just changed a few words from this.
Why didn't they just make a decent vanilla Android tablet & phone?
All they have to is contract out the hardware and add free software to it. Keep it updated too.
Loads of people just want no bullshit vanilla Android stuff.
Dell has three different web sites (home, small business, enterprise) which show different products at different configurations, and it's nearly impossible to find the basic chipset specifications for a system. Lenovo's web site was full of 404 misdirects and products they didn't really sell until recently. HP is a dumptruck of different glossy cases with a variety of shiz crammed into them.
The bar for competency is incredibly low in their industry. I hope all three of them implode when newegg decides they can assemble components into whitebox pcs. Open and shut.
It's only dying as a consumer appliance. Professionals and power users will always need a powerful general-purpose computer with a real input device (a.k.a. keyboard) and a screen bigger than 10 inches.
If Dell or HP even survive it will be based on their Unix offerings.
For Dell, this means Linux.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Yawn, yet another "teh PC is DED!!!!1111" article, the kind we've seen every few months for the last two+ decades.
The most glaring assumption (spurred on by Apple Cultists, of course) is that stock price is some kind of indicator of market success. Apple is STILL a niche player, and never stopped being so. For a brief time they did a great job of expanding the smartphone market (kudos for that, despite the fact it would have eventually happened anyway), but now they're once again a bit player.
The number of PCs greatly exceeds the number of people with smart phones, and the number of people with smart phones greatly exceeds the number of people with tablets. Apple is no longer the biggest smart phone producer (that's Samsung), iOS is no longer has the largest market share of the device market (that's Android). Apple's last refuge is the tiny niche market of tablets... which they'll probably lose this year as the tablet market expands to a somewhat significant number of users.
Getting back to the issue of PCs, Apple's OSX has a single-digit market share. In fact, more PCs are using Windows Vista than OSX. If Vista is a failure, as MS haters claim, than what is OSX?
Anyway, this is just more fact-free blabber, the kind that's been spewed by non-serious techie-wannbes for more than 20 years. The PC will outlive their careers in the tech industry.
My personal experience is that HP and Dell are the preferred suppliers for this sort of thing. Who else are you going to buy? IBM/Lenovo, Acer, or Asus? None of them have the value that Dell or HP have these days for general purpose desktop computing.
Hell, Dell/HP are my preferred server vendors, as well. When it comes to servers, they tend to have less gongshow anachronism than IBM. UEFI actually boots quickly on their platform(s). While they use less Intel Ethernet, it's something I can work with, versus the craptastic RAID controllers shipping on IBMs (at least on Windows; with Linux, we have other options on IBMs, eg. LSI firmware and mdraid).
Do these vendors really have that much historically locked up financially in home user sales that the home PC market flatlining (or, at least, becoming commodity) is enough to sink their business? Servers and storage may not be 'interesting' but they're fairly high profit margin and low support (vs. home user desktops). Intuitively, their profits should be up. So why aren't they?
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Using company money to buy a yacht is actually a really good idea. Definitely what I would do if I had that job.
Tablets and smartphones aren't the problem. The problem (for the vendors) is that few things these days warrant a pricey new PC. /w 1024MB).
It's not that tablet/smartphone users don't have PC's. Most do. Most still use their PC's
But the PC they had 3-4 years ago is still good enough (ok, add some RAM if it's Vista
They may get a virus and require hiring somebody to clean it up, but that's still generally cheaper than a new PC.
However, what most people DON'T need is a quad-core i-7 with 8GB of RAM, 3TB HDD, and a dual-sli video card.
At most, they might need under 1TB of space, onboard video, a dual-core CPU, and a few gigs of RAM.
Yes, CAD users, graphic designers, and some others may differ, but the public at large doesn't do that much that requires a new upgrade.
In terms of smartdevices, the evolution is still pushing new product. Newer phone = updated OS, faster processor, better UI, more games, etc. Same for tablet.
They'll hit a ceiling as well, but at the moment the problem isn't that people don't need PC's because of portables, but rather that they don't need upgrades because what they have is good enough.
I think HP should bring back Carly. Her strong conservative leadership is exactly what HP needs to get thrahahahahahahaha no that would be an even worse travesty
Well, sure, but they won't be buying a new one every two years, and the margins for HP and Dell and such will be razor-thin.
if she had time, then she could have led a big turnaround. she just didnt have time to articulate her vision.similar for her star-crossed run for senate.
I would fire the whole board and start fresh there. Get some good leadership at the top!
And how exactly would you do that? The whole system is corrupt and completely rigged for the specific purpose of preventing that from happening. Things like special classes of stock which are only given to select insiders and that give them increased numbers of votes over the "regular" shareholders , making it impossible for "dissident" or "activist" shareholders to have any power.
HP is Nokia; Dell is RIM.
personal computing devices is the new area for growth, and has gone around PCs.
Because 'personal computers' aren't personal computing devices?
The problem is, once consumers stop buying them, economics turns against the pros. Also, are you under the impression that tablets/phones wont be able to dock up to a real 'workstation' with a screen that is > 10 inches???
Good-bye
Or, you know, the PC market may just be retreating into its respective niche of the computing market. Doesn't mean it's dying. Bold claims should be backed up by solid evidence and sound reasoning.
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
I assumed he meant Carli's eyesight wasn't bad. Nothing else made sense.
Hewlett-Packard Co. used to be known as a place where innovative thinkers flocked to work on great ideas that opened new frontiers in technology...
That innovative part of HP was spun off into Agilent years ago. The part of HP that was left behind from the spin-off was just an ordinary PC and printer company.
Agreed. Compared to buying Palm, buying a Yacht is a really good idea. I assume the yacht still has some residual value....
PCs are a mature market, and they may not change as much any more, but they aren't going away any time soon. That's because people don't create content on a phone.
Nevertheless, somebody has to make PCs, glamorous or not. It might as well be these companies, just like Proctor & Gamble makes toothpaste and soap. Is there anything fundamentally wrong with that?
I can has beans?
So now we are not able to criticize women because that's sexist? You remind me of this: http://i1.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/352/749/e44.gif
if the board had any balls/lady-balls they would all resign en masse, I would bring in bill campbell for one, and definitely tim cook.
I say and speak my mind all the time around here. I get troll as well as insightful often. If all you are getting is troll to the point your karma is so low you have to make another account, perhaps you dont know your audience and you would be better served by another community of like-minded individuals. Im not saying 'get out' im saying evaluate your effectiveness to this particular audience.
Good-bye
Well, sure, but they won't be buying a new one every two years, and the margins for HP and Dell and such will be razor-thin.
Their profits are actually quite good. But then you subtract all the money they pay to incompetent executives, and all the money they waste on pointless mergers and acquisitions, and suddenly they are losing money.
There will always be someone to service the market. We use all sorts of weird PCs for data capture and analysis at work. The company that makes our sells a few hundred a year tops. Doctorow rants about civil wars aside, there will always be a nice for general purpose (or high end specialty) computing.
(Replying to Original Commenter's comment): Yeah, HP sucks, but so does Dell and Acer and Gateway and everyone else who makes PCs.
(Replying to both comments, but mostly AC's): I think you over estimate the demise of the PC and also don't understand what they are used for in Enterprise. I agree that, in general, the PC business is declining. I think that will result in a lot of consolidation, likely into segments where the consumer PC business will consist entirely of low end PCs and the enterprise business will consist mostly of high end servers. And HP's bread and butter is in the Enterprise, so I suspect that a company like Acer or Dell will end up "owning" that business and HP will "own" the Enterprise business. Everyone else will go out of business.
Speaking of enterprise, there are a LOT of applications running on PCs in the enterprise. Salespeople run client / contact management software, account managers run portfolio analysis software, HR runs tons of HR-related apps, there's a myriad of software running on desktops in the enterprise and upgrades are required all the time. I don't see PeopleSoft being replaced by an iPhone app anytime soon.
-- "In order to have power, I must be taken seriously." -Mojo Jojo
The PC market is in decline, but it is not dying and will not die in the near future. The main reason for sluggish PC sales is that the technology has reached a peak at the moment (or you might say it has finally matured) and consumers no longer need to buy a new system every couple of years just to keep up. Since the dawn of the PC era users have had to constantly upgrade their hardware to run that new OS, that new game, or that new multimedia application. That time has ended. A decent system bought 5 years ago will still run everything it needs to.
True, the rise of tablets and smartphones also gnaw at the PC market, because some people only want to check their email and log onto Facebook, but the power, flexibility and usability of the PC will remain indispensable for a large amount of users and professionals.
1 design the system with a smallish second harddrive that can be removed (move the recovery thing to this device) ,1 t, 2 t, 3t (with and without the recovery partion)
A sell a number of drives that can fit that slot 500 gig
B setup this drive to be used as a backup
2 move the value add programs to some sort of "ap store"
3 have the parts manual on the backup drive
4 MAKE SURE YOUR STORE WEBSITE CAN RECOGNIZE A LOGIN FROM YOUR COMPUTER : if i hit the HP store website it should automatically know that i am using an HP product and give me options that are compatible with that system.
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
I was at Lucent when Carly was there - I thought she was a waste of space then, and I was shocked when HP hired her. HP was "Bill and Dave's company" - by and for engineers making great products. It was obvious to this outsider Carly was the wrong choice - I had no idea how right I was. A friend in HP Sales confirmed there was dancing in the hallways the day the HP board finally canned Carly. The only good part of HP that is left isn't HP at all - Agilent Technologies is as close as we have to what Bill and Dave started.
"If not for third-world markets, the PC would be in complete freefall."
Strange, Apple keeps selling record numbers of Macs. Perhaps there's something wrong with the rest of the PC industry.
Stop that. Please, I beg of you. Stop saying PC dying. I have yet to see a tablet that can handle the Autocad/Mastercam/Catia drawings that we work with. I don't want to be stuck having to build this shit from scratch, or purchase a server just so people can use the software they have to use every day.
Before you all go off on 'virtual server/blahblah' I'm telling you, we have tried, and nothing beats having each user have a PC at their desk using the software to do their work. Just because we can make the PC last 5 years before having to replace it, doesn't mean that the PC is dying.
Keep your stupid investor hands off the PC market. Seriously. - Love, Aerospace Manufacturing
Sorry, not even close. most trobled "computer" company perhaps.
I'm pretty sure Nokia beats both Dell and HP so far as loss of market share and market value over a short period of time by a long shot.
It's all in how you phrase your responses; I almost always have karma overload, and yet I do the odd bit of trolling, and tend to disagree with people when I actually disagree.
There's a difference between bowing to the popular view and alienating those who hold the view.
You make a lot of very good points, but waste them by making a lot of unsubstantiated accusations in the same posts. When you then make a few bad poitns and make unsubstantiated accusations in the same posts, people flag you as a troll, and will treat you as such even when you say something valid using the same tone.
People don't like being called idiots, and they don't like those they admire being called idiots. If you instead follow the socratic method, ask more questions, question people's logic instead of their humanity, you'll find you get +5 instead of -1.
Has someone written a "How to have karma without being a whore" FAQ? If not, they should.
Idiots, saying idiot things, because they're idiots.
The vendors who have been more OS agnostic have done better.
Desktop and laptop PCs are a commodity. Deal with it. If you don't want to be in that market, get out; there are others who will remain as long as the demand is there. You can't expect Apple-sized profit margins when you're selling a commodity product. You can eke out a bit on each unit and hope to make it up in volume, or focus on selling good service contracts to businesses. But you're not going to "reinvent" the market.
No one is under the impression they can't be docked. The issue is performance. They can't even match low-end machines from 5 years ago, let alone any modern desktop machine from this century.
. In fact, there are plenty of people who detest Apple and everything they represent. HP used to make quality equipment, then went on a serious crash. HP doesn't need this so-called 'innovation', it needs to make quality equipment with good support. Since this is in such short supply, they should eventually reap the rewards. They need to become the type of company that Warren Buffet would invest in.
But thin clients are the future! Stop being old and crusty and resistant to change even if its change for change's sake and for the worse.
I as well. Goodness knows how many anti-Ron Paul posts I've made that have had my posts modded down. If you're consistently being modded into oblivion, it's not because you're a dissenting voice, it's because you're either just consistently flaming or trolling, period.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I've wondered why not have some technologies filter down to the humble PC that would get people buying again:
1: First, the case and PSU. It would be nice to add the battery for the UPS on the bottom, so the machine will keep going even if unplugged, and would start shutting down if power is off or low after a couple minutes.
2: A way to have removable 2.5" HDDs for a RAID array. RAID 1 is a must have these days. It would be nice to have a standard case/cartridge/tray for that size so hot replacement would be easy.
3: An optional TPM module daughtercard. This way, if someone likes me wants a TPM, it can be obtained, but DRM makers can't assume a TPM is on every computer.
4: Perhaps "smarten" up the HDD controller with some SAN like functionality. Have the ability to have backend configurations like RAID 5 or 6, but then hand the rest of the machine virtual disks that can be snapshotted and backed up without the OS knowing or caring. The controller could even have filesystem independent block level deduplication so if the PC has a hypervisor, it would save plenty of space if running multiple VMs of the same OS.
It would be nice to plug in an external HDD, take a snapshot of the running OS, then copy it via a vhd/vmdk file to the external drive as a quick and dirty way to do a backup.
5: Built in hypervisor. It would be nice to be able to separate the VM used for gaming and browsing from the VM used for getting work done, just for security reasons. Plus, with snapshots and the ability to roll back, restores end up being fairly easy.
6: If Tandy could do this in the early 80s, modern PC makers can. If a machine ships with Windows, put a bootable copy of the OS media on a read-only flash partition. This way, even if the HDD is replaced, the box will always have some type of OS available.
7: One of the old HP boxes I had used a nVidia chipset which did hardware level firewalling at the NIC level. Combine this with an updatable blacklist, and this would be useful for separating machines that are botnet clients from their C&C upstreams.
8: An "erase all" function that would not just do a dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/whatever, but do like HDDErase and do an ATA "secure erase", which zeros not just the drive sectors, but the protected areas and the relocated sector table ensuring that data is gone, or it can't be read in the first place. This would be very useful for handing a machine to someone else, but not having to pull the HDDs out.
I always find it funny that people post all this intriguing prophecies... as AC
Oblivion Awaits
Ah, yes, Carly "I never met a well compensated, high tax revenue generating engineering position I didn't want to ship overseas" Fiorina.
How is the old bat doing? That senate run didn't work out so well, did it? Wonder if she spent any of her $20 million severance package on it.
As bad as she was at HP, many any gods or goddesses that exist NEVER forgive her for the destruction of Bell Labs/Lucent. She was part of the team that brought about the end of pure research at Bell: research that once led to transistor, the silicon microprocessor, fiber optics, communication satellites, Unix and C++. Oh, and it was a Bell antenna allowed humanity first heard the echos of the Big Bang.. Bell Labs was a key component in the USA's post WWII tech boom.
So, basically, fuck that cunt.
Care to offer up anything besides Linux chestpounding? What little market share MS is losing they're losing to Apple. Linux still hasn't done anything of note on the desktop. What little they accomplished in nearly 20 years Apple did in a year.
Linux is a dead on desktop. Everyone outside of Slashdot knows this and has accepted it. If the desktop market continues beyond 2020 I expect it to be mostly Apple and MS. Some of you will linger on with Linux but you'll be shrugged at much like you are today.
Oh, and if you're waiting on Steam to save Linux? You're really doomed. I've recently seem what Steam on OSX is like and if that's your idea of a supported gaming platform that the masses can embrace you've got another thing coming. Steam's support of OSX is pathetic.
Honestly how much have computers changed since the early 90s? Faster and more powerful. The average person doesn't know the difference between one graphics card and another. Even chips speeds got blurry when they all abandoned the cold war of speed. You used to have a good idea about chip speed just based on the name. Now I have to compare benchmarks to have any clue about speed. They are the same over sized shoe boxes they have always been. Complain all you want about Apple but at least they broke the mold with iMacs. Desktops still have their place in the home and office but what they are finding is the family needs one desktop and lots of handhelds where as a couple of years ago each kid potentially needed one for homework and surfing. It's ironic that tablets passed desktops as media machines. It's still a hassle playing media files on a desktop and seamless on a tablet. On my desktop I always wonder if it'll handle the videos codec and I have to deal with the system's twitchy player or the various players fighting over who gets the file to playback. All these problems go away on a tablet. The joke is I watch movies on my tablet while I work on my desktop. They need to reinvent the desktop but they dropped the ball. The desktop could have been the entertainment hub for the whole house but no one has made the plunge. Apple is the closest but even they seem to be dipping their toes in the water. They had a chance with the Apple TV and iPad/iPhone combo but they choked and didn't fully intergrate them. Everyone whispers about an actual AppleTV, basically an oversized iPad, but no word in months if it's more than a rumor. It's as if the PC world is afraid of the water so they are riding the sinking ship down instead of trying to swim and risk drowning with a failed product.
Doesn't anyone remember what Apple had in 2007 (Steve Jobs and his working "reality distortion field") and what HP had in 2007 (Carly Fiorina and her distorted view of reality)?
Quite. There are two issues here.
There's the form factor and the basic input/output methods and there's the raw computational power of devices. The relative weakness of ARM based devices is why you've got products like AirVideo or Plex that handle decoding tasks that ARM devices are incapable of.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Oh, please... Fuck you and anyone who can't handle accurate criticism of anyone other than lily white males.
So glue a cock to her and paste on some chest hair. She represents the worst of the American business mindset. Go read what she helped do to Bell Labs and Lucent.
You can pry my gaming PC from my cold, carpal tunnel stricken dead hands. There are more than enough of us who have no desire to 'abandon' a traditional PC to comprise our own demographic.
Maybe he meant her eyesight was 20/20.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
Yet I continue to not need or want a tablet or smart phone. I am reading this on a dying platform. Sniff...
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
Possibly, but these niche markets will not support companies the size of dell and hp. And with the volume quantities of smartphones being sold it may soon be a lot more cost-effective to build a functional niche computing box *around* such a device (with a dock or similar) instead of the traditional motherboard, chip etc....
It bears repeating.
The problem is that companies (HP,DELL, etc) hasn't innovate and doing the basic R&D in the last 10 - 12 years. Everyone has been
using another Microsoft OS, nothing new has come out that revolutionize what the consumer wants.
Companies need to have basic research lab, to try out new ideas
It wont be long before Apple sues you out of existence for ripping all their ideas up. Just close up shop now.
Dell developed a lot of the techniques of manufacturing customization. They built lasting stuff.
In the 90's & early 2000's HP (Carli specifically) was busy throwing 10's of thousands of professional jobs overseas, killing off American jobs in the process. The Corporate bean counters thought, ya, cheaper over there, we save dollars and make more profit... WIN! What the bean-o's miss is that every single job sent is one less customer, and more importantly, one less person who understands the process and can bring innovation into the company. We are now reaping the benefit of that short sighted greed. Ultimately, unless the US realizes the value of on premise intellectualism, this country will continue to devolve to 3rd world status - full of monkeys just smart enough to run the machines, but to dumb to complain or revolt.
Be bold, tell MS to piss off as the exclusive OS maker, and make new gear for a new OS.
Yes it came be done, BeOS for example, made by a handful of people, did things that no OS could for years.
Had any large PC maker had the balls to stand up to MS and supported it, think where it could have been by now.
This is what we need, new thinking, new vision, MS is dragging (or holding) that down.
So go on HP, try it Dell, take the plunge Acer, be innovative Samsung, let go of the MS teat and see what you can accomplish.
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
...again and again.
Said the administrator of the mainframe with attached dumb terminals
That post was nonsense.
I bought my first $300 PC in 1988 and it was an Atari. It used pretty much nothing in common with an IBM clone. It used a much more expensive CPU than what typically came with IBM clones. Yet it was cheaper and better than any clone I could get at the time.
We already have dirt cheap general purpose ARM devices.
The idea that we need kludge clones for cheap computing is just a Lemming fantasy concocted to pretend that the rest of us are beholden to Microsoft even if we aren't Microsoft users.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
c'mon; don't be stupid. He said "Unix" offerings so what he means is servers. And yes; Linux is doing fine there.
I read that as PC makers in desperate need of a robot and I thought to myself, yeah that's a pretty good idea. If HP made a decent robot I'd buy one and they'd have high profit margins again.
Android and IOS are the killers. In the case of Android it runs on a ton of different platforms and I must say I'm rather impressed by the Asus pads.
Overall, though, outsourcing was a success story. By the time a company starts outsourcing, the original owners are gone or don't care about their company anymore. Outsourcing, along with all of the methods of turning brand recognition into cash (cutting quality, QC, etc), are about sacrificing the company's future for immediate profit. I don't think any of the executives who benefitted from outsourcing thought that the company could survive after it. It was about cashing out. The ones who followed, though, and inherited the company may have had some delusions about the company still being healthy.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
It just won a billion dollar settlement which is the beginning of their campaign to obliterate choice in tech.
That is nonsense. Apple provides PC desktops/laptops too, which allow you to do anything you like. They will continue to do so.
In fact even on mobile platforms Apple does not eliminate choice, they could shut down jailbreaking if they really wanted (or make it way harder than it is) - they choose not to.
What Apple IS giving users a choice over is, do they want a totally open-ended experience? They can get a "real" computer.
Does the user want a computer they don't have to administer pretty much at all? iOS device.
Apple then added a middle choice, which was "how about the power of the desktop but we'll give you a secure source for applications which you can use as much of or as little as you like" - the Mac app store.
Before Apple introduced the "App Stores" to the world at large (and I know there were plenty around before, just not as widely known) the users only had a choice of what was basically a wide-open system where apps just came from anywhere. Lots of freedom, but too much freedom for a non-technical user to handle easily - hence a world of viruses and malware that arose as a result.
The world needs choice. That means it needs the newer more secure platforms, like iOS. But it will continue to need much more open systems too; and those will continue to be available (although with hardened defaults again to help non-technical users not hurt themselves too badly).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Also, are you under the impression that tablets/phones wont be able to dock up to a real 'workstation' with a screen that is > 10 inches???
Sure they will. And what you'll get is an expensive, absurdly underpowered, restrictive computer that specialises in running the kind of software you get if you spend $2 in an app store.
The current generation of mobile devices is doing very well because they serve a vast and previously bizarrely undersupported market: people who want a portable device for easy information consumption. If you're not doing any sort of content creation, significant computation, or catering to more than one user at once, you can get by with the kind of processing power you find in an iPad or a Galaxy S3. If you're not expecting much in the way of interaction, you can get by with a touchscreen and very simple user interface concepts. For the market where they are wildly successful, the current crop of smartphones and tablets are excellent devices, balancing low power consumption, ease of use, portability, and "wow factor" against a bunch of downsides that their users simply don't care about.
On the other hand, as soon as you do need to do anything creative, or do any real computation, or scale up to multiple users, or support non-trivial interactions, the current crop of mobile devices suck. All those downsides that didn't matter before are now dominant, and the high price, low power and almost zero flexibility are fatal liabilities. And no matter how much window dressing you lay out, they always will be, because it's not the job these devices were designed for.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Take a look at this thread where the message is PCs are dead because what people have is good enough. Now think about Windows 8 and more importantly Windows 9. Think about those laptops: capacitive touchscreen, a hinge to flip the laptop from touch to keyboard mode, a good trackpad, ultra thin, retina, high end battery, SSD.
People don't have Windows 8/9 machines. When you wonder why. People are voting with the dollars that they don't want desktops.
When you're looking back at Carli Fiorina as your salad days, you should fold up shop.
Fiorina is one of the most overblown, overrated CEOs of her time. Anything she touches turns to shit. She's about as smart as a paper bag.
Actually the power user probably will be. I certainly do. In fact hmm now that you mention it it's about time I upgrade this quad core i7 and give Ivy Bridge a try...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Are you under the impression that most people need hardware more performant than low-end 5 year old gear? They don't. Manufacturers knew they wouldn't. That's why they pushed so hard for leasing. What people need is software that's not designed to make the least benefit of their hardware, but the most. Fortunately that is available.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Most of what Dell does is desktop and laptop sales. I get that. Its only just starting to get into the server business. So, to say that it needs a reboot is probably valid considering that most of its business will likely shrivel up and die as the next new thing comes in...
However, HP is different. I haven't seen an HP laptop or desktop in years. Most of its sales from what I see are in the server hardware and software business. (OK probably printers/scanners are big too). To say that it too needs a reboot because users are going to move on to the next big thing is just wrong in HP's case. How is HP a PC vendor? It hasn't been one in years.
HP makes some awesome servers. They sell some pretty good software. In my opinion, HP needs a better sales team...
1) They are losing money to Dell in the server hw space. They need to outprice and outsell Dell here.
2) Their enterprise software (Openview suite) needs a better sales team. They should really be in more enterprise companies than they are, and they should have a lower price point per server to make it more attractive to smaller companies.
Agreed. I'm outspoken and often disagreeable, and my karma is excellent. He's doing something wrong.
I'm glad I'm not the only one.
I agree. Anyone who is a "PC enthusiast" has long been a builder of his/her own systems and was never a customer of Dell and HP anyway. Asus and Gigabyte, maybe, but not the mass-market junk fed to the ones who don't know any better. Shame about Dell though, they used to be really really good in the late 80's/early 90's. And shame about Compaq, being bought out by HP which should have stuck to making calculators and laser printers.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
You can dream all you want, but the PC market IS dying. It will escape into the high end, which worked really well for the Vax and the Mini's and the Unix workstations...
On the positive side, you're working with graphics and you are likely having to put lots of memory into your PC's to make them decently fast. The power consumption and cost of both GPU's and memory is going down rapidly right now, so expect to see some insanely powerful tablets for graphics work in the coming years. 3D in high resolution could easily become mainstream and that will demand GPU's powerful enough to make any CAD user happy.
CPU power on the other hand will probably not be totally satisfactory for your use. Hopefully some of the calculations can be moved to the GPU or into the Cloud or something.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Just buy the server. They don't cost so much for what they are.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
A PC running Windows using a smartphone/tablet form factor with a 128 MB flash hard drive. Onboard screen and peripherals like mouse and keyboard are all bluetooth. NO wires, except for power. They'd have some flexibility on size. It might be a little larger or thicker than a phone or tablet, and with both 7 inch or 10 inch screen sizes if screens are included (Built in screen and keyboard optional on the more expensive models). Bonus points for autoswitching seamlessly between phone company internet and local Wi-Fi hotspots, with the emphasis on "seamless." Extra bonus points for working HDMI ports, or better still, wireless HDMI (plug-in receiver included).
In other words, make it worth my time to buy one.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Bill and Dave's company became Agilent Technologies, a designer and manufacturer of first class scientific instrumentation and test equipment. They're making money: profit margin ~ 14%, return on equity ~ 22.5%, dividend ~ 1%. The dividend is not great, but the other figures look ok. They're not really dependent on consumer retail sales like HP, so they're part of a different part of the economy.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
Yes... I think the hundreds of thousands of thick clients on the iPad agree with you!
... seeing as how they led the race to the bottom.
The story of HP is just sad. A truly great company, ground down by a series of clueless leaders.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Coincidentally, right after HP peaked, they hired former Microsoft Windows boss Bill Veghte who is just recently made it to COO managing daily operations. He is in grand position to perform his Elop maneuver on HP when Windows 8 launches, announcing total commitment even unto death. How odd that after all these years the heads of BOTH of Microsoft's two largest and most successful divisions might jump ship almost simultaneously and wind up at the head of key companies just at the pivotal moment. Uncanny, eh?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Well, I don't know you, but I appreciate that people do that. At least when it's civil and well-considered.
I was kindof enamored with the "Ron Paul for President" idea at one point, and changing that had much to do with people pointing out some of the more radical ideas and consequences. They were things I hadn't thought about. And I don't usually argue with people about their political opinions, but I read what other people say and that's (sometimes) useful.
So, "good on ya", for that... regardless of what it did to your karma.
How is it dying even as a consumer appliance? Tablets and PCs aren't a zero sum game at least for now. You buy a tablet, you probably already have a laptop. Tablets aren't replacing them.
It's a bit like how one or two years ago, everyone was predicting that mobile gaming was going to replace console and PC gaming, and a few years before that there were predictions that games were going to replace movies. "At this moment, A is increasing in popularity while B is decreasing in popularity, therefore A will replace B!" is foolish even if B and A are competing. If they're not, then it's downright idiotic. Movies were not replaced by games, nor will they be ever. Mobile games did not replace full games, nor will they ever. Tablets will not replace full computers nor will they ever.
The only reason one would suggest otherwise is to get page hits for saying something outrageous, or trolling.
I'm still running on a Core 2-based system I built four years ago, and see no reason to upgrade for at least another year.
The PC isn't dying. It is, however, going to undergo a dramatic shrinkage as a lot of people realize that they really only ever consume data. In that area, tablets and phones are going to replace PCs.
PCs will be the exclusive domain of the nerds and content creators. Just like it was in the beginning.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
What power users buy HP and Dell machines? I've built my own systems since my first PC around 20 years ago.
Oh look - it's one of bonch's many, many extra accounts. Look - no one has it in for you. Your problem is your irrational hatred of all things Google, that makes you do stupid things like crapflood Google stories with 20 GNAA troll posts.
Sometimes, a troll moderation is just someone disagreeing with you. If every person with mod points thinks you're a troll, then maybe, just maybe, it is you.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
They haven't done anything with the Mac Pro line for so long, there's nothing for the generic manufacturers to imitate.
/ Just trolling
// Or Am I?
microsoft driving people away from their OS just means they will use Apple or Linux for their desktop OS. Companies running their businesses badly (like hp and best buy) are just running their businesses badly. Until someone can convince me how I can get as much done on some other type of device that is not a PC I expect the PC is dying about as much as the automobile. Oh, and you do realize "the cloud" is just dumbterms (mainframes) all over again right?
Power user, if you're happy with a four or five year old work station, you are not a power user.
Carly Fiorina put the nail in the coffin. Good thing she didn't get elected to congress.
Actually the power user probably will be. I certainly do. In fact hmm now that you mention it it's about time I upgrade this quad core i7 and give Ivy Bridge a try...
Yes, we're all so impressed with how much money you can spend on your computer.
Well there you go -- the PC, meaning the x86 Personal Computer we've all known, is dead by your own words.
You want a Workstation. Right now that's got a lot of overlap with a gamer's PC, but it is still a pretty expensive specialty beast compared to what most people buy for home use.
The overlap is over. Your workstation is about to become more like the SGI of yore -- very damned expensive kit because it will have little hardware in common with the mass market.
We can scream and fuss and rue all you want, but it's /over/.
Not sure it's good to lay all the blame at one individual's feet. It's a much bigger problem, the whole MBA and spreadsheet takeover of all technology. There had to have been other idiots who went along with her short-sightedness within HP. And there are still such bean counters everywhere else. Private industry decision makers seem to all be of the mindset that nothing longer than 5 year profits are worth considering. There had to be more of them than Fiona.
Over the last decade maybe, funding for biomedical research has done a similar thing: there's been more federal funding diverted to short-term payoffs, translational research, and less to basic, unguided research. Research of both types are needed, but with translational research, the payoff is closer. Private companies can and should be funding that research since it's more likely they'll be able to make a profit from it. The government needs to stay out of research that is likely to make a return in a few short years: that's just giving money to private industries. The government should be funding research that is important but longer term.
So, yeah, fuck her and all the other MBA types in positions that require long term vision. The only job they should be allowed to take is scratching lottery tickets.
That is true for the home market, but not the corporate.
You know, I understand the frustration. However Fiorina was right. Unfortunately she was right.
I cannot underscore it enough, how much I am accenting the word 'unfortunately' here.
Why am I saying it? Because USA laws, regulations, taxes and inflation make it an unproductive, uncompetitive place to run business in.
If you want to understand what I am referring to, here is something for you to consider:
US manufacturer destroyed by US law, minutes 19:19 - 49:19 - here was a manufacturer, whose business required buying specialised miniature solar panels and the best supplier was in China. The new tariffs that were introduced basically killed his business. He was manufacturing an attic fan that used that solar panel, but all the rest of the manufacturing is (still) done in USA.
Now consider this: the new tariff means that for the businessman to stay in business he MUST OUTSOURCE ALL (100%) of his manufacturing elsewhere (Canada and Mexico are both inviting him in).
His business helped USA to reduce the enormous trade deficit that USA is running, because he was an importer as well as an exporter, his final product is bought around the world.
The sad part is that he was a poster-child for Obama's campaign when Obama sat down with supposedly 'small business community' where the ONLY person at the table that actually was a small businessman was this guy. The rest of the people who Obama was really talking to there, they were all large corporations getting something from Obama, they all wanted something. This guy didn't realise that he was used as a political prop at the time though.
Now the new tariffs are putting him out of business in USA and the only way to stay competitive, to stay in business is to move the business outside of USA.
--
Now back to Fiorina, AFAIC she is a fucking GENIUS. She didn't wait to be in the same predicament as this poor schmuck. She predicted a similar situation for her company and acted before it happened. As I said - it's unfortunate. But to understand the reasons behind it you need to understand the very problem itself in the first place.
----
(oh, and if you want to moderate this lower, you can take it upon both of my accounts, this one and the first one as well).
MY OTHER COMMENTS
games actually drove the PC hardware market. The latest, greatest game would only run the top end settings by
utilizing hardware that didn't even EXIST when the game was released.
These days we have consoles and very, very few games are built with PC only in mind. Too much money to be lost
by ignoring the console market. Thus, any games made for the PC have to be " dumbed down " for lack of a better
word to ensure it will run on current generation consoles. Even though top end PC hardware can absolutely crush
any console on the market today.
In fact, it seems these days the games are made for consoles FIRST, then ported to the PC platform.
Other than 3D / CAD software and the like, there really isn't anything to push the hardware makers to innovate anything.
Especially at the consumer level.
I mean, seriously, how much horsepower do you need for Facebook or Twitter ?
what is GNAA? just trying to air both sides of an issue. sorry if i bruise some egos. and dont give me that bonch crap.
You want to upvote/downvote? Go back to Reddit! Here we mod up/mod down.
My last university did that - they had a service contract with Dell, then HP. This amounted to having a truck or van come over every month to replace broken PC's with new ones (basically the university IT department would cannibalize the working parts and swap them round so that only a handful of totally dud PC's were returned.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Go to the airport. Look at an airplane. Now look at your tablet. Now back at me. Now back at your tablet. Sadly, you can't read the specifications and dimensions listed on the blueprint for that airplane on that tiny ass screen. Look at the Internet, and now back at me. Your ISP has blocked retrieving that file from the iCloud because it's "too large/over bandwidth limit/insert other MPAA/RIAA restriction".
I'm telling you. Schools need to haul kids out to the field again. Let them get a real sense of what the rest of the working world has to deal with before they are allowed to make any decisions.
Dude I don't know what you have against shit and paper bags, but you're just being cruel comparing them to carli.
PC's have never been dying. They have a specific use, and it has always remained for years. It's not going to go away when portable hardware simply cannot compare with a pc's capability. That even goes for windows 8 surface devices. Growing? No, probably not. stable? yes. No worries, we're only due for another 20-40 years of "is the PC dying?" articles on slashdot.
Or we could have pc makers wake up to that they don't have to build windows boxes and start doing things which can, you know, reboot the PC industry. Dell is no exception considering they only offer ubuntu as an official option on old hardware.
brah, there's an app for that.
What exactly would you expect him to replace it with?
What exactly would he get out of the expenditure?
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
PCs are a commodity. Even those with high end needs no longer have to buy a new box every year and they don't have to buy it from a high end maker.
Is buying a Harley Davidson as your first motorcycle since you were 16 at age 49 a midlife crisis issue?
Nice idle cores you got there Mr. Power User. I'm so impressed.
I'd rate power based more on what you get done. If I can produce more with less then I am the higher powered user.
Also note: A real power user will understand when more cores will do him/her very little good and will keep his/her old system as there is no benefit in system churn.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Hopefully Agilent will snap up HPs trademark and associated IP when it finally goes up for sale.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Most do care about email though. While facebook is working at supplanting it, this seems to still do better on something with an actual keyboard.
Luddites obviously don't want a PC anymore, and I don't disagree with them. When a tablet or smartphone gives them all the functionality they required, such as the ability to tweet, change their Facebook status, and play Angry Birds, then there is no reason for the average consumer to require a PC today. So all those claiming the PC is dead, long live the phone/tablet, your voices have been heard a million-fold.
PC (or Mac) is still a very much required product for content CREATORS, you know, those people that make Facebook, Twitter and Angry Birds. You can't make apps on the iPad or iPhone, you can't make apps on an Android phone or tablet, and can't create app on a Windows Phone.
I think the PC market IS being rebooted, in the form factor of a hybrid tablet. While Luddites will need nothing more then a Windows RT tablet, the rest of us that develop and create content could easily see the old PC shoebox form factor being replaced by a Windows Pro tablet. Honestly the spec's of the Surface Pro exceed what I use for work to develop on and I am sure that there will emerge a new generation of Pro tablets with i7's and all kinds of fast multi-core CPU's and gobs or RAM that will essentially replace shoebox and laptop computers. As much as Apple has laughed at a tablet/PC hybrid, I think Apple is very scared of a market of competitive devices where content can both be consumed AND generated. A device that allows "enterprise" to easily gravitate towards a new tablet form factor running Windows is Apple's biggest nightmare, and its about to come true in a few months.
So, I won't rule Dell and HP out of the game yet, but if those companies are not ready to release a Windows 8 Tablet (both Luddite loving and Geek loving variants). then you should rule them out for being willfully stupid to recognize and adapt to market trends.
For me, a PC is anything that can be used to develop content on. While the average consumer needs nothing more then a device that beeps when it receives a tweet and some sadistic joke of an on-screen keyboard, there is still a large and strong market of people needing a product that can MAKE content.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
So the PC is like the workstation of the 90s. Not going to be the mass market store shelf device anymore. Problem is so many investors don't want to bother with niche markets like that.
In the professional world there is market for something other than the bottom of the line PC with minimal profit margins. Those PCs are doing well and will continue to do well. What's going to lose are the mom-and-pop home computers and computer makers who are oriented to that market.
Although even there I think for email and web browsing there will be a market for something better than a tablet or phone. Grandma and grandpa aren't going to be able to type so well on a touchpad and will have trouble reading the tiny words. Still will be a need for keyboards and LCDs at home. Plus the home business market will still be around (accounting, spreadsheets, wordprocessors, and so forth).
Since I use Povray for image rendering, I decided to install Debian 7 on the two ARM devices I have at my disposal (Samsumg Galaxy S II and Barnes & Noble Nook Color), compiled Povray 3.6 (3.7 is a bit difficult to compile even though it's multithreaded, but 3.6 is good enough to see what the processor can do) and see what the real results are:
Debian 7.0(armhf), gcc 4.6, -mhard-float -mcpu=cortex-a9 -march=armv7 -mthumb
-mfpu=neon -funsafe-math-optimizations
Parse Time: 0 hours 0 minutes 4 seconds (4 seconds)
Photon Time: 0 hours 1 minutes 30 seconds (90 seconds)
Render Time: 1 hours 20 minutes 38 seconds (4838 seconds)
Total Time: 1 hours 22 minutes 12 seconds (4932 seconds)
Debian 6.0 (armel), gcc 4.4, -mfloat-abi=softfp -mcpu=cortex-a9
Parse Time: 0 hours 0 minutes 4 seconds (4 seconds)
Photon Time: 0 hours 1 minutes 43 seconds (103 seconds)
Render Time: 1 hours 49 minutes 59 seconds (6599 seconds)
Total Time: 1 hours 51 minutes 46 seconds (6706 seconds)
OMAP 3621 @ 1.2 GHz (B&N Nook Color)
Debian 7.0 (armhf), gcc 4.6, -mhard-float -mcpu=cortex-a8
-mfpu=neon -funsafe-math-optimizations
Parse Time: 0 hours 0 minutes 9 seconds (9 seconds)
Photon Time: 0 hours 6 minutes 14 seconds (374 seconds)
Render Time: 5 hours 57 minutes 9 seconds (21429 seconds)
Total Time: 6 hours 3 minutes 32 seconds (21812 seconds)
Here are some results compared to other processors I have:
Ordered by pps:
Core i5 2400S (2.5 GHz): 235.177 pps ; 94.07 pps/GHz
Athlon II x4 (2.8 GHz): 179.82 pps ; 64.22 pps/GHz
Celeron 220 (1.2 GHz): 81.15 pps ; 67.62 pps/GHz
Pentium 4m (1.5 GHz): 36.24 pps ; 24.16 pps/GHz
Exynos 4210 (1.2 GHz): 29.90 pps ; 24.91 pps/GHz (-mfloat-abi=hard)
Atom N270 (1.6 GHz): 28.96 pps ; 18.10 pps/GHz
Exynos 4210 (1.2 GHz): 21.99 pps ; 18.32 pps/GHz (-mfloat-abi=softfp)
PowerPC 750 (700 MHz): 20.47 pps ; 29.25 pps/GHz
Pentium !!! (450 MHz): 12.43 pps ; 27.62 pps/GHz
OMAP 3621 (1.2 GHz): 6.76 pps ; 5.63 pps/GHz
Exynos is Cortex A9 and OMAP 3621 is Cortex A8. Cortex A9 is about on par with a Pentium 4. Cortex A8 can't even beat a a 14 year old Pentium !!! Currently there's only one Cortex A15 product that's available, but I don't have it.
That's HP-UX, actually. Although that may well suck too, never used it.
Sigs are so 1990s. No way would I be seen dead with one.
If Dell or HP even survive it will be based on their Unix offerings.
For Dell, this means Linux.
Maybe virtualization, professional services, and storage. Not PC servers, and I don't see what OS has to do with it, especially Linux which runs on the same hardware other systems do. The upgrade cycles for servers look as bad as they do for desktops right now
I'll be glad to write that guide for you. It's going to cost you 10,000 karma points up front. And I don't do oral.
Cause you can't chain someone to their desk if they can use an iPhone.
Remember the older Unix workstations, costing maybe $10,000 in today's dollars. Currently we've got super fast office workstations for under $1000; tons of RAM, tons of storage, fast networking. If the PC prices go up they'll still be purchased because there is still a need. Only they won't be handed out to each and every employee as they are now, probably a lot of workers could get by with just a dockable tablet instead.
I was in some labs in late 80s where we had several variety of unix workstations, lisp machines, minicomputers, some X Windows terminals, and those sorts of things were used by engineers and document writers and other similar employees who had a need for higher end systems. Managers and the like probably had generic IBM PC with DOS with a terminal to the mainframe for mail and corporate programs. Executives had expensive macs. Basically different workers had different types of computers they used. Today though things feel much more uniform; CEOs all the way down to entry level office clerks probably have a company standard PC, all mostly the same except that higher prestige jobs get larger monitors or laptops.
I'm sorry to say it, but power users are a geeky niche that don't really drive the general computing market at all. Most people who use computers professionally in a corporate environment (HP and Dell's target market) use them as glorified typewriters or to run some dedicated app, such as a finance package, required to do their job. The pendulum is swinging back, and the client/server architecture from the mainframe days is once again the way of the future. The corporate computer users don't need anything more than a thin client with their business app living in a server room. For such users, a powerful general-purpose computer is expensive overkill.
Try running Windows 7 Enterprise on a 2GB virtual machine running on a thin client. It's very slow.
Imagine the world today had hp claimed ownership of Wozniac's first PC?
You may say I'm a dreamer...
But I'm not the only one...
Take my hand and join us...
And the world will live, will live as one
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
"Vision" means that she was seeing things that other people could not see. Possibly related to business insight or possibly related to medication, but I'm not the one to say which it was.
I know Slashdot likes to mention Linux, but it still isn't a serious OS.
Where are the office apps that run identically to MS Office? Where are the photo apps that run identically to Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro? Where are the music apps that run identically like Calkwalk Sonar? Why so many 0.x versions of Linux apps, still? When can Linux run every game that runs under Windows?
Sure, Linux may run web servers and such, but it is not even close to a replacement OS for the Windows power user.
The topic is PC makers right? Why are you talking about HP and Dell when you should be talking about the people that make chips, motherboards, video cards, hard drives, and power supplies? You know, Intel, AMD, Nvidia, ATI, Asus, MSi, Kingston, Rosewill, and that lot.
. . . OOOHHHH you're concerned about the PACKAGERS. The people that take computer parts and put them in a box. Oh, well fuck'em. Seriously, what do they bring to the table?
It is highly unlikely that you will be unable to buy a bunch of screens and a keyboard.
Also, the reference to kids is a bit amusing.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Michael Dell should shut the company down and return the money to investors. After all that's what he said he would do.
http://news.cnet.com/2100-1001-203937.html
They also make servers, outsource IT, make printers, put crapware on their builds... they will be fine given the right leadership.
I am more concerned about those of us that build our PCs.
And just like in the beginning, you'll be paying a couple months salary for the privilige of owning a general purpose computer.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I just bought an HP laptop, not to mention I also have an Android smatphone. Those who think the PC is just gonna dissappear are way off the mark. People still use PCs but since the trend was to buy an overpriced smartphone they postponed the purchase of a brand new PC, but the smartphone is not going to replace them. Who wants to be typing a spreadsheet or even a large email on a smartphone?
That won't be fun for us. Prices are going to get high again due to lack of mass production.
No, it's not. There is tangible proof that the PC is going anywhere in even the distant future.
Nobody is going to do serious graphics work on a 10 inch tablet no matter how powerful the things become. The very notion is hilarious and means you know next to nothing about actual graphics design work. And CAD? Seriously? On a tablet? What kool-aid have you been drinking?
People with have laptops and desktops for many more years, to create "content" (whatever that is supposed to mean). People will not have PCs; their desktops and laptops will not be their own personal computers, they will be controlled, monitored, and remotely deactivated by whatever company sells them. It is a matter of freedom. PCs are about freedom, and freedom is being attacked -- which by extension means PCs are being attacked.
Palm trees and 8
You are hilarious.
Yes, there are certain sectors where a true workstation is desirable or even necessary. It will be a long time before applications like Autocad, Photoshop, or Final Cut Pro are usable in a thin client or client/server environment. But I have a feeling that the percentage of computer users in a professional or corporate environment who use resource intensive creative applications are the minority of such users. The vast majority of corporate computer users probably use Office, or programs like Dynamics GP or Salesforce, or whatever custom business app the IT department cooked up. Such use cases are perfect for a thin-client setup, as they are not resource intensive and a hosted setup is easier for IT to maintain.
So no, the PC is not dying, but it is becoming much more of a niche device belonging to the minority of business power users who need powerful PCs to do their job, and geeky individuals who want powerful PCs to play with. These two groups probably aren't large enough to sustain the PC business as we knew it in the 90's and 00's.
And shame about Compaq, being bought out by HP which should have stuck to making calculators and high-quality instrumentation, which is what Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard built the company on, literally out of their garage, and which is what they were always good at, until Carly Fiorina, the bride of Satan, spun them off into "Agilent," which is a stupid name even though they still make some great instruments..
FTFY and all that.
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
by professional I meant people who use Visual Studio or Photoshop or Autocad for a living... not a corporate user running internal applications (which can indeed be ported to tablets as you say).
Yes... I think the hundreds of thousands of thick clients on the iPad agree with you!
I'm pretty sure that "thick clients" in this context is supposed to refer to the architecture, not the end users.
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
I went through a couple of used Dell OptiPlexes, they seemed fine.
I now have a nice used Compaq that cost me about $200 3 years
ago and should be good for another 3.
Id rather not even browse the web or write a letter on a mobile device. Its not just for business devices but for those as well who want a somewhat comfortable home computing experience, not trying to type a letter or look at web pages on a tiny screen. The PC is not dying, to say so is a major misreading of what is going on. Mobile growth is faster because its an unfilled niche, not because they are better at doing what PCs do. Basically, an 8" screen and a chiclet keyboard does not replace a 25" screen with a full size keyboard with about 200 times more storage, processing and memory. If mobile computers came first, and then PCs came along as a new innovation, PCs would be seen as the next great thing, look, 25" inch screens, no moire being stuck oin that chiclet keyboard and 8" screen.
I have yet to see a tablet that can handle the Autocad/Mastercam/Catia drawings that we work with.
Sure, but what you fail to understand is that only about 0.01% of the entire market wants to use "Autocad/Mastercam/Catia". That 0.01% is not going to sustain a viable PC market. You will still be able to run those apps, but like in days past, you'll have to pay tens of thousands of dollars per system to do so, because you won't be able to piggyback on the commodity PC market any more.
This is a direct result of being told what innovation is by a monopolist rather than actually having innovation in the software marketplace.
Does anyone really think the way that office 2010 handles macro management is better than 2k3? Did visual foxpro really have to die because access is good enough? What about lock down in using private key in the uefi? What's going on with silverlight? Has anyone produced a "killer app" in the .net runtime?
The lack of pc sales is because we let microsoft make all our development decisions for us. Now software usability and productivity is getting worse with every upgrade(?).
I dont think its in decline, its mainly just that its saturated so we're seeing more of a replacement cycle. While mobile is unsaturated so there is more room for growth. I think mobile will probably eventually saturate and growth will level off. PC I think in the long run will remain the main way access stuff at home, if people are looking for the best value, most computing more and best computing experience for the dollar, its the PC. Mobile devices are best for mobile use only, when you are at home, the device is by far the most expensive and most inefficient computing device you can use
I guess no one actually does home finances or writes a letter to their relatives anymore.
No need for those crappy Windows servers, clients and productivity software. Its a post-PC world people! Time to bring back the hippie lifestyle.
I worked at Merck. This could just as easily be an article about the pharma industry. Somewhere in the glorious mid-80's it became more about marketing and managing than it was about product. Then, in the early 2000s there was no more product. Happened in all sorts of companies.
I guess no one actually does home finances or writes a letter to their relatives anymore.
All of which can be done on an iPad.
Whether or not you agree with what apple make or what they run on their machines or not, one thing is clear: they have the logistics sorted out.
The PC makers are firing wildly in all directions in an attempt to capture parts of every market, and in doing so are throwing away economies of scale - which lessens their ability to compete.
Newsflash: if i go to your website for a laptop, and there are more models than I can count on one hand or so, there is a problem. There's no need for it, and all this does is increase the R&D costs, manufacturing costs, etc. Apple can drive costs down because they sell large numbers of a small model count. They can build them with sturdy, quality chassis at this price point because of this, and the PC OEMs simply can't compete without killing their margins (and going broke). Or, they sell 40 different models of crap that no one would want.
HP: cut your model line down. Machines with/without GPU in 12" (ultrabook) and 15" form factors. A single workstation spec portable in 17" form factor with engineer spec GPU. 2 specs of desktop: generic end user class, and custom workstation spec. Shit-can everything else. The reduced model count will allow you to build that smaller model count at a higher quality with better margins.
Leave the massive diversification to specialty PC makers or build-your-own tweakers. There is no profit in it.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
PC makers are basically packaging other people's hardware and software to make a low-margin system that users can use to manage their data. Just about everyone has figured out by now that the hardware and the software don't matter anymore because they are a commodity. What does matter is the D-A-T-A that that hardware and software is managing. Consider...if someone steals your computer, they get maybe $200 worth of resellable hardware and software and that's only if your computer is fairly new. But all of those documents, photos, collected data, records, etc....are priceless to you if you lose them. If you've got them backed up somewhere on something, you go buy another computer and you're rolling again with the backup. If it isn't backed up, it's a life-changing loss. So no one cares anymore if their computer is the fastest or has the latest version of Windows. All they care about are things that help them to keep their data safe like ease of backup, access to cloud storage, and familiarity and comfort with their software and hardware.
Sometimes one wonders if slashbots have ever heard of these rare and mysterious computers called "laptops".
In DSO there was a saying we had "We're not leaders, we're fast followers." Innovation was always killed internally and only when our compeition did it would we implement it. Corp wasn't afraid of law suits because of our size. If someone used HP they either counter sue or buy the company.
I left after being disgusted with not allowed to do anything but bug fixes and ripping off our competition. Even with that I was flooded with red tape and paper working asking why I did what in what way.
> Yeah, because the hardware manufacturers who've bedded with Linux have done so much better...
oh, you mean like IBM? yeah, they HAVE done much better now that you mention it!
they were the preferred supplier for pcs (i.e. you'd better had a damn good reason not to buy from them). for that they gave us special pricing. Over time though, prices went up... and up... till even with our special discount you could get stuff cheaper from dell. so by bye hp hello dell.
now all we need is for dell to hire some f*cking sales people so that when we ask for a quote it doesnt take 2 weeks for them to get back to us. oh and make sure they know what they are doing, not quoting for a different part (like a non touch sensititve monitor when we gave them the model number and description of the touch sensititiive part)
To grow long term you have to innovate. Cutting cost might work for a quarter or 10, but not long term. HP and other hardware companies have done very little innovation lately. I thought HP changed its ways when it bought WebOS. Sadly when they did buy them, the clock was ticking, and apparently HP was not lean and mean enough to do something with it before it lost mind share. What innovation are they working on today?
But I thought some of Dell's current financial situation hinged on a few issues:
1) ASUS, the group that used to make Dell's notebooks now makes a completing line of notebooks which is not beneficial to Dell's competitive advantage.
2) Dell was in a position where they were able to repackage EMC equipment through a deal that EMC pulled out of a bit under a year ago which has reduced the number of product lines available to Enterprise customers.
Those seemed to be the bigger things weighing against Dell. The rest of this seems to be a be of FUD regarding the future of desktop computing.... which, from where I'm sitting, is looking pretty safe.
Dell sold just under 12 million computers - they go as cheap as $300 or so. Apple sold just over 5 million computers (Macs - not iPhones or iPads or iPods), and they start at $700. Seems to me Dell would do better to just drop the cheap crap and raise their margins. I think their pursuit of marketshare above all else is hurting them. If Apple can sell 5 million expensive computers with no low-end offering at all, then why can't Dell?
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
There are 3 classes of x86 computers for 2 classes of machines.
Laptop
* Cheap netbooks - $99 target price (overseas travel)
* Good enough laptops - $400 target price (office)
* High end laptops - $800 target price (crazy people)
Desktop
* Low end - $50 - $200 (media center players)
* Good enough - $350 (home server, kid's PC)
* High end workstation/Gaming - $800
Most consumers are extremely price sensitive.
Apple doesn't count. They've found a way to charge 2x what the competition charges and convince their customers this is a good deal. Perhaps it is.
People like me want open platforms, where DRM is possible, but not required. I'd like silence for all platforms and any screen less than 1080p is a joke. I miss the 1440p screens from 2005 on a cheap laptop.
How do you notice that the desktop has been replaced with a tablet? You'll obviously still be using your keyboard and a proper screen. All it will mean is a bit more space under the desk.
But yes, the high end PC's will persist for a long time. You can still buy a Mini or an OpenVMS server. They just offer completely crap value for money compared to the mainstream. You cannot actually buy a Unix workstation it seems (at least I couldn't find any from HP or Oracle). A high end CAD workstation today is simply a PC with a powerful CPU and high-end gaming card + different firmware and extra graphics memory. Once the high-end PC gaming cards and the high-end PC CPU's disappear, CAD workstations will need to find something else to build on. Luckily tablet CPU/GPU's look like they will become quite usable for the purpose. If you really need the power, you can run them in parallel. Single-thread CPU performance will still suck.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
"more performant"??
Really? I know language evolves, but is that necessary? Does the meaning of the sentence change if I say "...performs better than low-end 5 year old gear? "
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
PCs are not dying. They are just finally (nearly) completely commodity items.
Unfortunately for the likes of HP the thing that the market doesn't need in that situation is either large behemoth producers or an innovator. At this point all that happens (except for the high end which I cover in a second) is that the small players bring the price down to near cost while adding small improvements. There simply isn't anywhere massively different for PC form (box on/under desk, big screen) to go for now - people generally don't need more power or more features (hardware wise) than we already have there - hence all the R&D and consumer interest is going into phones and tablets. Of course there are the niche markets but the only one in the desktop arena is hard-core gamers and that isn't a very large market with the current state of gaming - the other power niches (high-end CAD users, other number crunchers, people with large databases to process, and so forth) are all moving (if they have not already moved) towards online processing or at very least their own little server farm (the likes of HP can still make a business there I'm sure, though that is not relevant to discussion about the "PC" market)
From a personal computing point of view we already have a reboot: it is the phones and tablets (and TVs & related set-top boxes, but in terms of both OS, other software, and hardware, these overlap the tablet market so much you can't really consider them much separate - the R&D for each feeds into all). If the likes of HP can't jump on that bandwagon they'll have to wait for (or have the luck to find or create) the next big thing or and/just hope their other markets (the server and large-scale "solution" markets) can make up for the drop-off in their personal computer market share.
There isn't going to be a revolution in the PC market. There will be many small improvements, maybe something large enough over time to be called evolution. There is no need for any such revolution: they do many jobs well, and to do the other jobs people want other forms are more suitable. They are not dying out though - they are just dropping into the relatively stagnant area of solved problems so you can't sell a new one to the user every year or two. The revolution is the developments in over areas (phones and tablets, for the time being), and even they are getting to the "we have all the features, the just need refining" stage already so in the next year or few we'll be saying the same things about tablets/phones/settops/TVs/etc needing a reboot.
Are you not used to properly formatted paragraphs?
Besides, it's an OLD BSD is dieing post, changed to another product.
-- This space for lease, low setup fee, inquire within!
The PC isn't dying. It is, however, going to undergo a dramatic shrinkage as a lot of people realize that they really only ever consume data. In that area, tablets and phones are going to replace PCs.
PCs will be the exclusive domain of the nerds and content creators. Just like it was in the beginning.
Unless you're calling every person in an enterprise who needs to write a Word document a content creator, then I think that's an underestimation.
They had a chance of making a comeback with their Palm acquisition but they fucked that one up.
GENERATION 25: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
I have an HP laptop. It has a number of profoundly dumb design choices, like for instance putting the disk activity LED on the side where you can't see it. I managed to correct that, with some bit of personal effort.)
Perhaps those little mistakes reflect the bigger corporate ones... or the other way around? What's the sayings... what goes around comes around, or you reap what you sow?
I work where I need to have a serial port to connect to instrumentation.
Nowhere can I buy a laptop that has even one serial port so that I can take it to clients sites to do diagnostics.
Give me a laptop with a serial port and I'll buy them by the dozen, for myself and for the other field engineers
if i hit the HP store website it should automatically know that i am using an HP product
Say a visitor is using Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome software to view a home PC maker's web site. How, technically, should the web site be able to know what brand of computer the visitor is using?
It's still a hassle playing media files on a desktop and seamless on a tablet. On my desktop I always wonder if it'll handle the videos codec
VLC media player for Windows is just as seamless as the media player applications that came with my cousin's Archos 43 Internet Tablet and my ASUS Nexus 7 tablet. The only reason it isn't bundled with desktop PCs is patents.
I run Windows 7 enterprise in 2GB for plenty of toy VMs and it is not very slow. If your VM is very slow, your admin/vendor totally fucked up the spec of your VDI hardware, possibly skimped on storage IO or similar.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
I foresee an period of consolidation in the PC market. There are too many players for all to be profitable. Lets hope victory does to somebody other than Me-Too companies like HP and Dell. If you want to be seen as a vibrant player you have to bring customers something they can't ax easily try from spur competitors. That's why Apple is winning. They're not afraid to make big investments and take big risks to open new markets.
A high end CAD workstation today is simply a PC with a powerful CPU and high-end gaming card + different firmware and extra graphics memory. Once the high-end PC gaming cards and the high-end PC CPU's disappear, CAD workstations will need to find something else to build on.
Or, they'll just go back to what they were before PCs became powerful enough to use -- specially-built workstations that cost an arm and a leg. If the aerospace industry needs them badly enough, they'll pay whatever it takes. I remember the days when graphics cards for CAD workstations cost well over $10k.
I foresee an period of consolidation in the PC market. There are too many players for all to be profitable. Lets hope victory does to somebody other than Me-Too companies like HP and Dell. If you want to be seen as a vibrant player you have to bring customers something they can't as easily get from your competitors.
That's why Apple is winning. They're not afraid to make big investments and take big risks to open new markets. I'm not saying they've brought a lot of real innovation to the market; they haven't. But they've brought products that worked pretty well to the market as soon as the technology allowed them to make something slick and appealing.
HP, in contrast, has focused on making computers that work just like everybody else's computers and let Microsoft Windows limit their innovation. I trace HP's decline to beginning when they split the company and spun off Agilent. All the creative minds seem to have gone to Agilent and HP has focused on the commoditized markets -- computers and printers.
There is still a pretty big server market. I suspect power users will go back to buying "server" class hardware, workstations. I.E. a workstation with a few changes (like a better video card) reconfigured for power users. Its hard to imagine the market not being big enough to support the server -> workstation conversion market even if there were only a few million power user workstations sold per year.
Apple spends a ton on R&D. Apple has a reputation for quality and quality of service. Apple buys part in advance.
There is a good reason the average PC is $515 and the average Apple $1400. On the other hand there is room for $800 PCs. And companies like Vizio http://www.vizio.com/computing/ are forgoing making crap to focus on the $800 market.
Whilst i agree with your sentiment: steam supports OS X just fine. As in, it is a content delivery platform and store. The actual content on steam is a separate issue, and this isn't valve's problem. If no one writes stuff for OS X (or Linux) don't expect the steam client to magically port everything to it.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
. I don't see PeopleSoft being replaced by an iPhone app anytime soon.
Peoplesoft runs on servers. PeopleTools, the developer stuff, will probably stay on PCs. But why would the viewing reporting tools not work fine on an iPhone?
Where is the Windows shell that operates identically to XFCE and Bash? Windows is fine for running overpriced Open Office clones, but it's got a long way to go before it can replace Linux.
You buy a tablet, you probably already have a laptop. Tablets aren't replacing them.
Unless you're a child living in a household where the PC belongs to a parent and the parent hogs it. How is a child with ready access only to a tablet supposed to, say, learn to program a computer? AIDE will count only once Android tablets start outselling iPad tablets.
It's a bit like how one or two years ago, everyone was predicting that mobile gaming was going to replace console and PC gaming
If more phones and tablets included physical gamepads, this might have happened. But it didn't, and genres that depend on a physical gamepad stayed on the consoles.
These professionals will be able to afford the higher prices once PCs become a niche tool. Students and hobbyists likely will not.
I use all 12 of my cores in my desktop at 100% on a daily basis you insensitive clod. Ever heard of make -j ?
Why wouldn't students and hobbyists be able to afford future PCs? Do you know how much an Apple ][+ cost? How about a PC-AT clone? Hobbyists afforded all of those.
The professional market will still be larger then the whole personal computer market was in 1990. And the technology is now commodity, so I don't see 2K basic desktops happening again much less workstation pricing.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
When was this, exactly? They were dinosaurs in the 1980s, best known for products such as keyboards that you could readily kill someone with (if you could lift one), which would last forever... although you needed to use a hammer to type on one. And the infamous RPN calculators, because they were too cheap to put in a few more chips to handle algebraic order-of-precedence. (You will probably still find HP apologists arguing for the "more natural" design of this inverted math format to this day.)
Would they want it after a decade of building their own brand?
The actual measurement capabilities of the old HP gear may still be damn good but it lacks the modern conveniences like USB and ethernet support, small size (stuff that used to fill a rack now fits in one instrument case) easy to read displays, buttons to null out the leads so you don't need to mess around with four-wire measurements and so-on. Old engineers may have nostalgia for the brand but gradually all those engineers are going to retire or move into management and more and more people are going to remember HP as the brand on the old gear they pulled out the back of the cupboard, that works well but is a pain to use.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
It wasn't Carly Fiorina who ruined Lucent dude it was that glorified router saleswoman that somehow got promoted to CEO, Pat Russo. They thought somebody from sales would know how to run a tech company built on innovation!? Argghh! Sure, Steve Jobs was a miracle salesman but he was never an actual "salesman" you know what I mean? How can some companies be so fucking clueless when there are millions and billions of dollars at stake?
"Hewlett-Packard Co. used to be known as a place where innovative thinkers flocked to work on great ideas that opened new frontiers in technology"
Was I in some parallel universe when this was happening?
"Like HP, Dell missed the trends that have turned selling PCs into one of technology's least profitable and slowest growing niches."
The only trend Dell, like HP were following was the directive from MS to not enter other markets, as MS perceived such as stealing their own market share. As far as MS is concerned the OEMs are just the delivery people. That's why companies with no contractual relationship with MS were able to expand into the mobile market.
AccountKiller
It's not very efficient or ergonomic to have HR (or any) staff staring at reports on a 3" screen all day. It's great to check your mail on the run or a quick text message, or using the browser to find a spot to have a few beers. But it's not intended for reading reports, or working on full screen apps that manage portfolios (for instance) or analyze sales leads.
-- "In order to have power, I must be taken seriously." -Mojo Jojo
Except you can't produce more with less, it's not like the extra cores in his proc slow him down. He's always going to be 'higher powered' than you.
PC sales (excluding Macs and iOS tablets) have dropped by 1%. Worse, HP and Dell are being replaced by Lenovo and Acer.
Some pundits are showing year-to-year growth in PC shipments but only by including Macs, which have been selling in increasing numbers every quarter for a couple of years now.
If I used a sig over again, would anyone notice?
Time to send out an SOS:
Stupid stupid stupid dumb dumb dumb stupid stupid stupid
Stupid stupid stupid dumb dumb dumb stupid stupid stupid
Repeat until something happens.
Your sarcasm is scathing. Dell is the company that ships three computers with identical specs yet they have three different disk drives in them.
If I used a sig over again, would anyone notice?
Oddly enough, Dell's margins are pretty good only on the biz PCs. The consumer gear hardly makes any money. Yet they are already losing share. Those in the industry would say they are losing share pretty rapidly. THey have gone from #1 to #4 in just 4 years. If they raise their prices as you suggested, basically doubling them, you can imagine what would happen. Apple has their own gear, their own OS, and their own Ecosystem. They can charge whatever they like. Dell is stuck competing with every other Wintel guy.
When I use mod points, I use them against the uninformed and unintelligent. I don't use them just because someone disagrees with me in an intelligent way.
My biggest pet peeve is people posting about something they get wrong that was already explained in the comments. Read before posting, folks.
If I used a sig over again, would anyone notice?
Anyone sitting at a desk all day running reports is going to want a PC like form factor, including a full sized screen. The issue is whether:
a) the cpu has to PC like
b) the OS has to be PC like
c) what percentage of the office worker workforce needs this
Only if seeing the inside of your own digestive track is considered good vision...
It gripped her hand gently. 'Regret is for humans,' it said.
I don't know about you, but I don't build my own laptops.
HP's TX1000 convertible laptop was pretty cool, but it was clunky and heavy by today's standards. For some reason they sold versions without the touch screen, and that's what I had (bought used). When they were new it cost too much. My current laptop is a Gateway NV53a, which is just an Acer. It even has the same body style as some of the Acer laptops. It's surprisingly sturdy, and at over a year old it's definitely holding up well.
My next laptop will probably be from Apple, but if not, it will at least be one of those other ultra thin laptops. My desktops tend to last longer since I upgrade them in chunks. If generations were marked by case changes, (and not the parts inside that actually matter) I keep a desktop around for 3 to 4 years or so before building a completely new one.
The PC companies could save by not focusing on consumer desktops anymore. Businesses order special models in bulk, many just need thin clients, and the rest of us tend to buy laptops and tablets now. Oh yeah, and I have an Asus Transformer, but the transforming tablet doesn't completely replace the laptop for everything - Surface might change that though.
I thought she also made a point to get rid of the engineers and then became a H1-b cheerleader.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Get rid of the philosophy to send stuff offshore, bring back the engineers, and take a page from General Motors' own efforts to bring things back.
Wouldn't hurt to avoid contractors like the plague either, since it shows a sense of trust not found in many companies today.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Feed the staffing companies to the same shredder, and anyone left in that company that uses them or advocates indirect labor.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
As an owner of both. The HP calculator division in Corvallis Oregon needs to make a comeback. The other growth market is the Microservers they offer. Most people have phones, PCs and or tablets. Fewer own a personal server of their own, and The Cloud takes some of the steam away from that idea. Most stand-alone NAS are overpriced, and underpowered for what they do, but people need need a viable place for their, ahem...sea-faring content, and a Microserver NAS is a viable proposition.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
Same here, I always call it like I see it and have as many that hate many as like me but it all evens out in the wash and my karma stays excellent, even when I had that crazy last year that would mod down everything I posted the next day as well as follow any posting I made anywhere on the net with "Die you fat fucker die". So if I can have excellent karma then the noh8rz guy must be just flaming for the fun of flaming instead of merely speaking his mind. I really have to give /. credit for that, there are many here that support free speech, even when they disagree with you. Thumbs up for that.
As for the OEMs? they got big and fat and spoiled by the MHz wars, MSFT too, where they could just slap a chip in a box or laptop and people would buy because their year and a half old machine was already horribly outclassed. That just isn't the case anymore, I have many customers on 5 and 6 year old multicores that are just as happy with the unit today as they were when they bought it so simply slapping chips in systems isn't gonna cut it.
They need to innovate, show people what they can actually DO with these new systems, such as how I show my customers how they can have an HTPC that sips power and feeds media to anywhere in the house, or they need to accept the market is mature and learn to get by on less, its just that simple. Because as it is now a good 85%+ of the people out there will be perfectly happy with a first gen Phenom quad or even a Core Duo, because they are so overpowered compared to the work they have for the machine it'll have tons of cycles to spare.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
When Dell secretly started taking rebates from Intel that accounted for basically 100% of their profit they screwed the entire industry. How can anyone can anyone compete fairly in a market like that?
Actually I believe it's gonna get worse before it gets better and we can blame Wall Street and Washington for the mess. Look at the graphics in the video, see how much money has been pumped into the market by Washington. Why is that bad? Simple because when you have THAT much money chasing so few stocks the stock itself no longer is a representation of the perceived value of the company but what the stock itself is worth and this rewards short term thinking, even when it ultimately kills the company.
For a couple of examples Westinghouse and Circuit City, in both cases the CEOs gutted the companies, selling anything worth a nickel in the case of Westinghouse and firing all the top sales employees in Circuit city's case. Did they get punished by the market for obviously taking a match to their companies? Nope the stock went UP because their short term numbers went up. It would be like burning down your factory and then the stock goes up because "Hey their expenses are waaay down!". We've seen it time and time again, CEO comes in, guts the company, stock goes up, CEO cashes out, stock falls through the floor and the employees and anyone left holding that stock is fucked, while the CEO and friends already cashed out and have moved on, probably while being praised for their "cost cutting initiative".
So sadly we'll be seeing a lot more MBAs...Master of Being Assholes, run these companies into the ground, because for those at the top its a viable profit strategy, its only those on the bottom that get fucked.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Free Trade is a lie. Its a lie because countries like China can use slaves and criminals, can dump toxic waste out the back door (fully 20% of China's farmland would now be considered a superfund site if in the USA) and they tariff the living shit out of our stuff going in, yet we are just supposed to take it and smile? Screw that, we need to be as nationalistic as China and India, protect our own, and only trade with countries that have similar environmental and worker protections. Otherwise all we are doing is exporting our waste and misery.
So frankly I feel not the tiniest bit of sympathy for your attic fan creator, he should have to live next to the factory that is making those panels. If he leaves the country we should slap him with tariffs no different than they do to us, period. As it is we're the HS football team playing the Broncos and the Broncos have already bought off the refs just to be safe.
The only way to compete with countries like India and China with "free trade" would be to turn the USA into just as big a polluted hellhole as those countries. That might be fine for those in the high rises drinking purified water and organically grown food, but I like not having my water filled with toxins and my kids not needing gas masks to breathe outside, thanks.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I guess no one actually does home finances or writes a letter to their relatives anymore.
All of which can be done on an iPad.
Or on a sheet of paper using a pencil.
finally people have awoken to the fact that they don't need a desktop PC to get a TV guide or view movies or sort pictures, that's why the PC industry is on the decline. It won't disappear because businesses still need them, but most other people don't. If WoW came to the iPad, thousands more would crawl out of their dark rooms and give away their PCs.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
So, yeah, fuck her and all the other MBA types in positions that require long term vision. They should all be rounded up and shot.
FTFY.
You simply didn't understand a word of it, when you are saying: 'screw the attic fan manufacturer', you are talking about a guy who is reducing the US trade deficit. Putting him out of business, when his business is mostly manufacturing in USA, while buying a component that cannot be manufactured in USA is really stupid.
All it does it gives him 2 options: shut down entirely or move out of USA, guess what, most people in that position prefer to keep their business even if it means moving out.
This does not at all mean that by being 'nationalistic' you are going to have businesses spring out inside USA. I am from the former USSR, we didn't have businesses spring out behind the iron curtain, we just had entrepreneurial people who were hoping to leave at some point while doing something inside the country that was considered illegal. We had majority of the population that was poor, because they didn't have attic fans, or whatever, best products that could get gotten, was mostly foreign made, and we had a top class, the elite, who lived much better than the rest. They weren't producing anything, they were the political elite who had military in their hands, so they were the politicians that protected themselves from the population and from the outside world with military, that was it. That was the economy. You are going to be in the same position, you are moving in that direction.
Didn't you hear - those who do not know history will repeat it?
--
As to pollution, etc., you are going to have much more of it now, that you'll lose your manufacturing and the tools and the knowledge how to do, what you used to do, and then eventually the Chinese and the rest stop buying your debt, stop subsidizing you and giving you their products. Then you'll find out that you can't actually afford products from other countries if you are not manufacturing anything in return. You'll have to retool and rebuild manufacturing, but because you made all these mistakes, and lost your manufacturing, you are going to do it in the cheapest way possible, and you will pollute so much in your country now. So much pollution is going to be created now, with the EPA and everything else that your gov't pushed on you, because those very gov't functions, departments, destroyed your manufacturing and production. So you will end up polluting much more than free market would have caused.
Again, USSR was a huge polluter, because it was poor and had all that gov't to prevent free market.
And that attic fan manufacturer was one of the guys who produced something that could be exchanged for foreign made goods, thus reducing the balance of trade.
Saying: screw that guy, is exactly as the saying goes: cut your nose off to spite your face.
MY OTHER COMMENTS
Mojokid said " If there's one small dig ThinkPads have taken with regularity over the years, it's that though there's a ton of quality and substance built into these machines".
Which is why when it was my turn to upgrade got a top of the line w530. Yes it is super fast. But the Thinkpad substance is on a decline.
First of all the new chicklet keyboard design make me hit the wrong keys all the time. Especially the delete key! And this after two months of trying to get used to it. The old keyboard I could use without looking. But now they have removed all the physical clues. No more gaps between F-key-groups so I have no idea if I hit F5 or F4.
Then they have removed the status lights for such things as caps lock and battery vs charging.
And the screen is 1 cm lower than my old T61 - which was 1 or 2 cm lower than my older 4:3 laptop. Each new machine give me fever lines of code to work with. I am not a happy customer any more. My productivity has taken a hit and my boss won't like that.
But what can a girl do? Make my own?
I think the telefone/tablet crowd will soon realize that they are getting screwed and switch to real PCs again.
Well let's hope somebody makes one, then.
Most tablets currently on the market have an hdmi out and one USB port, if you're lucky.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
You don't need to.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
If Apple can sell 5 million expensive computers with no low-end offering at all, then why can't Dell?
Because Apple is selling 5 million expensive computers with no low-end offering at all.
Only Women Bleed (Sex, Sharia remix)
That's a perfectly cromulent word.
Im not saying 'get out' im saying evaluate your effectiveness to this particular audience.
+1 weasel talk
I work with data, lot's of it and use a workstation to test concepts prior to using server resources. There is a marked difference between CPUs from 4 or 5 years ago to today. It's not just the CPU and it's cache, you have to consider the disk subsystem, RAM and PCI bus. If you'd not pushing limits on your hardware then yes a old PC will do the job. Can't believe you've been modded up for ignorance.
Nooo, the iPad is sooo thin. It has to qualify as a thin client, not?
No benefit in trying out the latest hardware? We now have disk subsystems that can almost match RAM for speed, they didn't exist 4-5 years ago. If you're doing serious development, that is a huge paradigm shift. Sure, if you're not writing multi-threaded applications or test harnesses or running various database systems, you could cruise by with old hardware. To make the assumption that just because you don't explore the new or have reason to push bounds that no-one else does, is ignorance and time wasting. Your attitude is identical to Bill Gates claiming that 640K of RAM is enough for anyone. Then there is gaming...
I'm sorry we were talking about power users. While power users have laptops, most of them have desktops as well for the real number-crunching. You simply can't get a fast enough CPU or graphics card on a laptop because they suck up too much power/produce too much heat to be marketable.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
You can't do specialty chips and win for the workstation market today. You would need to sell millions just to pay for the first batch of chips, and that just isn't going to happen. Alternatively you need to aim for a $100k target price, and "only" sell hundreds of thousands. Not much better.
You can go for specialty server chips like POWER or... well, you could go for POWER. Good luck with that.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
We tend to cross workstation with PC all the time. But I agree. I think the PC will die out but the Workstation and Servers will fill our general computing gap need.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Dell, HP, Acer, Gateway, et. al. have been in a race to the bottom ever since the Mhz wars ended. They used to compete on specs that 10% of the market actually understood as well as price, but when everyone started using the same parts they built this market of razor-thin margins that they now fight for, where the single company that didn't play that game (Apple) is now growing faster than anyone, with products that have differences other than the plastics that contain the functional bits.
Last week Dell held a presentation here about VDI solutions where they were rattling off all the companies they have bought, with the sales pitch being that your whole VDI stack can be from one vendor including SAN, network, servers, thin clients; so there's only one "throat to choke" so to speak.
My counter-argument is that sometimes it's better to go with best-of-breed in each of the components for maximized performance, maximized uptime, etc.; and then there's also the problems that arise should your single-source provider go titsup, but whatever.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Warning: anecdote ahead, may not indicative of a larger trend.
Every three years at my company, we invite the major PC OEMs to make a bid for our desktop and laptop purchasing contracts for what our standard models will be. Last time around, HP, Dell, and Lenovo participated. The results boiled down as follows:
Lenovo - more performance, slightly higher price than Dell, average vendor relationship and contact on ThinkPads we were already buying.
HP - average performance, slightly cheaper price than Dell, great vendor relationship and contact on thin clients we were already buying.
Dell - same tired models we were already buying, same pricing as we were already paying. Average to poor vendor relationship.
Results: We now buy Lenovo laptops and desktops, HP thin clients and displays. Dell hasn't gotten a dime from this company listed in the Fortune-30 in the last two years, because they brought in arrogance rather than fresh product and fresh ideas.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Most did the MBA because they could manage people rather than learn what they did and get paid more money for knowing less.
Programmers who became programmers and did CS degrees because they wanted to get paid pots of cash for being a "web designer" were similalrly near-universally incompetent. The dot-com crash killed most of them off. Unfortunately, being tagged with "management" means that the mismanagement crisis that caused the financial crash cannot be blamed on the MBAs like it was with the web-designer CD student, therefore it hasn't killed them off.
And I didn't have to do all that (it wasn't required except back in the days of the GeForce 2).
What you may allude to is a driver for some specific unsupported hardware on Linux. But then again, look for a 3D driver on Windows or Mac for some hardware that doesn't have a driver.
Writing a letter to your relative you can use your pen, hand and some paper. They don't mind the lack of letterhead, untyped cursive font nor the lack of proper spellchecked content.
And home finances aren't really requiring a lot of work, even where such finances are being done.
Actually, what is happening is a repeat of 19th century US
It can't be USSR, because the USSR elite didn't own many companies or factories that actual produce (as you said, they just had the military). The rich in the US today have control of the factories and businesses. The difference between now and 19th century is just where those factories and businesses are physically located.
Furthermore, USSR didn't have the same level of discrimination against the Chinese that allowed for profitable business. Yes, racism is good for profits. As shown by hairy here, Americans of today and 19th century loathed and blamed the Chinese. But this very same hate allowed the entrepreneurs of USA to exploit cheap Chinese labor and disregard the complaints of unions... not that the unions cared for the treatment of Chinese workers, the unions just wanted themselves to be paid, it's all part of the discrimination that made 19th century US an economy powerhouse
Without Chinese labor, 19th century US wouldn't have become the largest economy, the same way Apple couldn't have become the most valuable company today without using Chinese manufacturing.
History repeats itself? GOOD. We want a repeat of 19th century US, where the economy was great
Saying the iPhone harmed HP and Dell is idiotic. It's a phone, not a computer. You can still do maybe 10% of common tasks on it compared to a computer and that includes typing at a reasonable speed. I think everyone here knows what really went wrong with HP and Dell so here's my suggestion on how to fix it:
1. use parts that are actually good
2. make money
That is true for the home market, but not the corporate.
I was responding to the statement referencing "professionals and power users", and was only addressing "power users". I've (unfortunately) dealt with many HPs and Dells in my professional life.
Agreed, but the problem is that the MBAs are basically right. If your only goal is to make as much money as you can as fast as you can, then the strategies they advocate are exactly the ones you should be following. Get as much rent from your customers as you can, let somebody else do the R&D but be ready to milk the commons as much as you can, and so on.
Most of the truly great inventions of the last century were created by people who were into the achievement more than the cash. And, most people like that lose money - sure some become filthy rich, but you could say the same thing about people who buy lottery tickets. You'll never see an MBA in line at the lottery ticket counter.
The only reason that Bell Labs had its heyday was that Bell could pass the cost on plus some to every phone customer in the country. Once they were no longer allowed to do that, then there was no financial incentive to keep them around. Bell was already a mature company by that point.
I've long said that companies go through three cycles. There is the original founder, who usually is out for more than just money but of course if successful still ends up with quite a bit of it (Google today). Then there is the founder's hand-picked successor who generally maintains the direction of the company, but often with less innovation, but not with the complete sellout to the bottom line (that is Apple or MS today). Then the next successor is picked by the executive search subcommittee of the board of directors, and they are MBAs who do what they do best (think HP today, or likely even Agilent though with a different customer base). The last are the ones that basically outsource all the jobs, stick their logo on anything like Schwinn, and so on.
The company you love today WILL eventually go this route if it survives long enough. That's why you can't count on altruism, even for companies like Google.
and if they did the plugin right then it should also hook into FireFox/ Chrome/ Opera/Opra/Whatever.
That's exactly what I was asking: how could a plugin be "done right" in order to hook into copies of Firefox, Chrome, and Opera installed later? Are you recommending that PC makers deploy some sort of background process that searches for installed web browsers and automatically installs an extension into those browsers? I can only imagine the sort of backlash that would get on, say, Slashdot; just look at what happened when Microsoft tried the same thing.
At one time Dell had more VPs than system engineers.
Dell has never been the same since I left. I don't know if that was cause or effect.
Personally, I think I get more precision on my input on a tablet than on a traditional PC, except for when typing is involved.
Clickable targets can be fairly small on a PC with a mouse or a stylus tablet: roughly 20px on a side. But on a finger tablet, targets have to be bigger because the finger is so big. There's a reason the first versions of iOS didn't include copy and paste, and that's because text selection with a finger is awkward. And good luck getting the precision needed to edit pixel art on a finger tablet without having to zoom in by a factor of 40.
Software blessings depend on what you buy
Or what a big company allows you to buy. Until October 2011, there wasn't an Android-based counterpart to Apple's iPod touch pocket-size tablet, and Apple has lately been using state-sponsored monopolies against makers of competitors to its iPad tablet.
that's because my current portable device has a 7-inch screen and won't listen to my Bluetooth keyboard
The fact that some tablets end up not listening to some keyboards is part of the problem with tablets. With a random tablet bought on Amazon and a random Bluetooth keyboard bought on Amazon, how can the end user know whether they'll cooperate?
Or maybe the first time you hit the HP support website using something Not MSIE it asks you permission to install the detector plugin??
A web site begging the user to install a plug-in is often the last thing a user sees before his computer gets infected with fake antivirus. See also a recent Ask Slashdot about scammers.
There are more dicks waving around here than in a bukake video.
and the blue rays, with the Jell-O pudding. I don't even.
Every time I see a story about the death of the PC, I wonder what everybody's smoking and when they're going to pass it my direction. Is everyone just pretending to freak out so that they'll roll out quantum PCs faster? Because this has no basis in reality, from anything I've seen. It's like everybody picked a favorite April fools joke and just has been running with it all year.
I seriously just don't even get what you people are talking about.
Every trollism an AC posts is prefixed, in my mind, with "A. Coward whined, in a weak and cowardly voice:"
-1 unable to see shades of grey
Dell employee here. We've never even come close to losing money in one quarter, ever. We just don't make enough profit to make Wall Street happy. Big, big difference.
You're... not talking about Star Trek, are you?
They can robot anything.
Fix them too.
Carly Fiorina was just doing the same "good business practices" as every other CEO and CEO-wannabe - the very same "good business practices" that shipped a huge amount of intellectual property out of the country and failed to replace it, preferring instead to concentrate on short-term revenue and stock price. These are the same "good business practices" that Mitt Romney is so good at and proud of. Hewlett-Packard is symptomatic of what has and is happening to a technology-driven economy being run into the ground by non-technical cargo-cult business managers. Sarcasm aside, we had better figure out how to take some of that cash being vacuumed out of the local and regional economies and cycle it back through as innovative product manufacturing or the US is toast for a while. There is plenty of time to turn things around but only if we start having an adult conversation about it instead of just pointing fingers and calling each other evil liars.
The main reason for sluggish PC sales is that the technology has reached a peak at the moment (or you might say it has finally matured)
But what kind of peak? Is it Mt. Everest? or is it just a local maximum?
Bold prediction: with the advent of self-driving cars, the next generation of PC will be portable and massively powerful because they will be in an automobile or Segway form factor. This way, tablets (plural and still easy to carry) can be used for the user interface but the real CPU will be on the same block. You don't want to lug your rack around on a shopping cart, but if it knows how to follow you around or even chauffeur you around, why the heck not?
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
Ask yourself why I looked at you product took my cash, went to Fry's electronics and built my own.
Why did they go to Apple.
You answer those two questions with product and your off.
Block his products, let him sell to the Chinese. I understand EXACTLY what you are saying, you don't give a shit how many people you poison as long as the attic guy keeps his business. Well fuck him, move his ass next to the factory making the panels and after his wife has cancer and his kids are choking on asthma he'll give a shit about environmental laws instead of where he can get the cheapest widget.
Funny you should bring up the USSR because that is EXACTLY where we are heading, only placing the $ instead of the hammer and sickle on the door. Know that 4 of the top 20 most polluted places on earth are in the former USSR? How about the fact that those at the top of the chain lived like kings there, while the poor lived like dirt....sound familiar?
If you think Chinese goods are fine and dandy, that all that matters is the bottom line? MOVE, don't let the door hit you on the way out. I have no intention of this country going back to the 1800s, with factory towns controlled by the corps that kept people enslaved, that created the superfund sites we have now, that has left places more deadly than walking around a minefield...fuck that and fuck any business that doesn't care about the people they kill with toxins, only their bottom line.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
In queuing theory, we learn that a server working at speed X is better than 2 servers working at X/2 speed. So tightly coupled 4 cores executing at speeds less than X but more than 2/3 of X are probably not giving any good results.
The reasoning is simple. The memory is not a quad memory, it is a resource where the cores have contention for access. Also for disk, etc.
Loosely coupled new architectures would be better, if the partner is improving access to physical devices.
The PC really is responsive enough for our email, browsing, responding to keyboarding, playing music, watching videos, and compiling programs. The power is there, will everybody be needing more power to do hacking of encryption algorithms?
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
The degree has been one of the largest private entitlement programs in a hospital. Get tired of dealing with patients? Run off and get an MBA, provided of course you have the schmooze and game-playing skills needed to get a corner office. For anyone outside the hospital industry you simply have no idea how much bloat these clowns have on the healthcare system in the U.S. Books are cooked, layoffs take place (without calling them such). Plus in most places they don't have to deal with these expensive "early-retirement" incentives. You're gone. Period. Just because someone has an RN or PA behind their name doesn't make them any less power-hungry or territorial.
I did pay a few hundred dollars in 1987 for a 20 MB hard drive. And I remember paying over $100 for 4 MB of RAM, so you'll have to tell me when that was. All from an IBM-compatible PC from a company called "Clone" (on Inwood Rd. in Dallas/Addison now, I don't remember it being there 30 years ago when I bought from them).
And I just bought an i7 quad core laptop with 16 GB of RAM for under $1000. My mouse likely has more computing power than my first PC (my first PC, a Commodore in 1981, predated the one mentioned above).
Learn to love Alaska
I had copy-and-paste on mobile devices before there even WAS an iPad.
I had copy and paste on my Newton, but that had a stylus. On what touch-only device without a stylus were you copying and pasting? The market has chosen, and stylus fans like us have been outvoted.
As for pixel editing, I can't even do that on a DESKTOP without blowing the screen up 800% or so
In GIMP on my 10" laptop, I can generally manage 600% with the pencil tool, or 300% when I'm using rectangle tools to move things around. But it's still nowhere near the 3200% or more that I need to consistently hit the right pixel in the Pixel Art app for Android on my Nexus 7 tablet.
Although a stylus beats "finger painting" for me.
Which is exactly my point: In my experience, even a mouse beats finger painting. Almost none of the current mobile touch screen devices include a stylus except for the Nintendo 3DS, and Nintendo's developer qualifications are far more selective than even Apple's.
I was going for funny, but OK!
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
No, you don't understand a word of it.
The free market that USA used to have provided it with the standard of living that Americans had because they were productive. The laws that were passed, the departments that were created, all the government that grew on that wealth that was stolen by the politicians from the productive people, all that it has done, it destroyed the manufacturing and productivity in USA. Inflation is a huge part of it, you can trace the beginning of this downfall directly to the US defaulting on the dollar, when Nixon removed the gold standard (temporarily, by the way, it was done 'temporarily').
The government started stealing from people on an unprecedented scale when that was done, the savers, the investors became the milking cows for the government just with the inflation tax, the public loved the spending, the public deserved this government.
As to this guy who runs his business and builds the fans in USA, with one component being imported, you are saying - fuck this guy. So what, you want to prevent a business from existing in USA based on the fact that he gets one component from China? As I said - the public deserves this government.
I also said it for years now that USA is moving in the direction of USSR. That's why I did move already, moved my business to Asia and moved out of America as well, I can't take another USSR in a different form, that's enough for me, I had enough of that. I am not going to pay for the stupidity of people once more.
MY OTHER COMMENTS
Here is the prescription for America that would actually fix the economy by returning it to being a productive nation.
MY OTHER COMMENTS
1 percent growth is within the realm of statistical anomalies.
Wake me up when it's 10% and then we might have something significant.
self correction: 1 percent drop.
I know Apple in dominant in this space, but it's amazing to me that we don't have any serious competition in the $1000-2000 laptop space. College campus bookstores now offer a crap Dell machine for the budget-conscious, and then all of the other offerings are MacBooks of some flavor. At work we buy 100% Lenovo. When someone flops a MacBook Pro down on the conference table, the contrast is just amazing. And I actually like the ThinkPads, but they look like they are from a totally different generation.
I think it would be great if someone seriously entered this space. Vizio is trying it out - I wish them well.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
True, but something is happening here. I think what's missing from the original post is that HP and Dell are being displaced by Acer and Lenovo. The decline in Windows computers is a separate story.
If I used a sig over again, would anyone notice?
So glue a cock to her and paste on some chest hair.
OH YEAH BABY! I'm all over THAT web site...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
I've always expected HP, Dell and eventually Lenovo to be displaced by companies that are more flexible with their options. Instead we end up with large vendors and small vendors, but nothing substantial seems to change with time.