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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."
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.
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.
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.
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
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.