In a surprising and unexpected move, Google and its partners have removed the recently launched HP Chromebook 11 from shelves.
There are still people in this day an age that are surprised by HP incompetence?
It's a bit surprising because the 'charger' that caused the overheating reports is just an off-the-shelf 'nominally micro USB; but provides more than 500ma' device, as used by virtually any small consumer electronics device, and the Chromebook 11 itself is virtually identical Samsung silicon (also used in Samsung's ARM Chromebook the Series 3), with Google doing much of the driving on software and design; because HP is a load of fuckups.
So, am I surprised by HP incompetence? No. Am I surprised that they failed to get some pacific-rim OEM slave factory to pair a USB power supply that doesn't catch fire with a board design that is virtually identical to a year-old Exynos platform, and a plastics kit derived from the actually-not-awful design of the Chromebook Pixel? Yeah, a bit.
That is pretty shady that they seize his materials, use it to their advantage, but then don't charge him with any crime. That's basically tyranny.
Commies like you have no faith in America. It's not like he had any reasonable expectation of security in his person, papers, and effects or anything, now is it?
"Flawed in principle" is putting it rather mildly. I'd put it as "complete and utter bullshit." Polygraphs are on a level with dousing and voodoo dolls.
We should really just go back to good old Phrenology. Imagine how sophisticated our discernment of the criminal type could be, now that we have rapid 3d scanning technology!
We could even have employees shave their heads, and do a daily scan as they walk in the door. If the bump indicative of 'leaking tendencies' or 'disloyalty' increases in size, we'll know something is up. This plan is practically infallible.
For the enthusiast, the multitude of options are welcome, but for everyone else......not so much.
Choice is good, what I dislike is the fragmentation-into-meaninglessness (and sometimes outright intent to deceive, like the cards that take a bottom-of-barrel GPU and throw in an impressive-sounding amount of RAM, albeit pitifully slow DDR on a narrow bus, then slap a big model number and a picture of a CGI chick riding a dragon or something on the box). Right now, the main contenders appear to be HD5450s on the AMD side and GT610s on the Nvidia side, with 2GB of DDR3. On the plus side, the whole damn card sells for just over twice what the RAM alone would cost, so there are worse ways to add video outputs to a computer that doesn't have enough; but those things get pushed, particularly at retail, on the rubes with the 'OMG 2GB!!!!' sell all the time. For the moment, 3GB and higher don't seem to have any such cards)
The cards (especially common in OEM gear and laptops) that have a model number that implies that they are chipset generation N; but are actually slightly upclocked generation N-1 chips, are also a scam.
The one use case that I could see (not that something akin to this hasn't been bodged into place at many large projects already), would be having the authoritative instance of the version control system living on a proper server, with backups and uptime and stuff(this doesn't imply 'cloud'; but if your particular shop isn't capable of it, the cloud salesmen might get you), and having a mechanism to make it easy to kick off compilation of the latest revision, on a machine or machines with a lot more punch than your laptop, and then make the results or horrible errors available to whoever needs to see them. (Again, 'cloud' not required; but may be a sell in some instances.)
Moving a glorified text editor with better highlighting and autocomplete into 'the cloud', when we have never had faster client machines, seems absurd; but I've never encountered a single-disk system secure enough to store something worth more than a pack of post-it notes on, and I don't think anybody has ever sighed contentedly and remarked that "Y'know, I'm genuinely satisfied at how quickly my large projects compile on my laptop!"
It's kind of a dumb question; but 'Azure' is actually a fairly slippery beast.
First it was going to be a totally new and revolutionary Windows, man, that, like, totally redefined what it meant to be 'Windows' and freed your mind from the constraints of a single 'Windows system' as you just ran your win32 applications totally in the cloud.
Since that time, it has moved more in the direction of an EC2-like "just a lot of VMs that you can spool up programmatically without calling your sales rep" structure, with the gradual addition of various more abstracted services (eg. 'MS SQL-compatible database, no need to look at the system underneath it', 'IIS instance of given capacity, no need to look underneath', etc.)
My impression is that the original Grand Architectural Vision of The Future didn't entirely pan out; but they've been fairly fast and aggressive about retooling the parts that did work into a mixture of rental VMs, and abstractions of services that abstract more cleanly than 'arbitrary win32 application' does.
The thing that gets really annoying is what crops up (usually a bit later in a given chipset's lifetime) where the various models simply become impossible to rank in order (without thorough benchmarking), rather than merely needing a lookup table to translate between model numbers and actual specs.
Model numbers, unfortunately, are garbage through and through, but once you get into the realm of "Well, this one has 1GB of RAM; but it's DDR3 on a 64-bit interface, while the other one only has 512; but it's GDDR5, except that this one has 256 shader units at 1.2GHz, and the other one has 300 shader units; but at 900MHz....." it just isn't pretty.
Braille displays are comparatively low resolution, and can be driven in software over serial, USB, or Bluetooth without specialized hardware. (The exception might be older TTY/TDD systems, which use some...eccentric encoding schemes that are of very limited compatibility with many computer modems)
Oh, I'd expect absolutely anything: total stonewalling, claims of 'fair market value' based on averages that include Radio Shack battery-powered RC cars, asserting that 'reasonable and customary' repair costs for a burnt out shell of a relatively exotic car are $2.50 and a pack of Bondo, etc, etc.
I just don't think that his continuing to drive through the first few (very bland) error codes is going to be remotely useful, except possibly as a sort of legalistic word-salad.
On the plus side, people still get to ask that question. We've gotten to the point where it would be relatively inexpensive to 'chip' many of the major FRUs, printer cartridge style, to allow the car to grab a timestamp(and if it has OnStar or an equivalent, it'll be a good timestamp) when a new part is installed, impose time or milage based expiration/replacement intervals, and reject 3rd party components that don't fully implement the authentication system... That would be fun.
It wouldn't surprise me if organizational dynamics come into the picture as well. If researcher X can purchase consumables and services related to his work up to X dollars on his own (subject only to oversight after the fact if somebody raises an eyebrow) and up to Y dollars with a sign off from the lab head or somebody; but would need 6 signatures, university-level approval for the facilities repurposing, and who knows what else, he has a pretty strong incentive to just pay Amazon to do it, even if getting an in-house system makes more sense in the longer term.
On the other side of the coin, if a university is looking for a prestige project that'll look pretty damn cool through the glass when they take tours around, they might get a butch, black, blinkencomputer even if utilization ends up being tepid.
The one (slightly) novel aspect of this, presumably also made possible because the workload parallelized well, is the use of Spot Instances. As the name suggests, these aren't Amazon's standard fixed-price instances; but are rather instances whose price changes according to demand.
You make a bid (specifying maximum price/hour, number and type of instances, availability zones, etc.) If the spot price falls at or below your maximum, your instance starts running. Should it exceed your maximum, your instance gets terminated. Using these things obviously requires a tolerance for server outages far above even the shoddiest physical systems; but if you can divide your problem space into relatively small, discrete, chunks, and get the results off the individual servers once computed, you won't lose more than a single chunk per shutdown, and spot instances can be crazy cheap, depending on demand at the time. My impression is that Amazon offers them whenever they don't have enough reserved instances to fill a given area, and will pretty much keep offering them as long as they pay better than they cost in additional electricity and cooling, so if you are willing to bottom feed, and potentially wait, there are some bargains to be had.
How about auto repair? I think it's a good place to start with mechanical skills because everybody owns a car, and knowing some basics will save you money even if you don't choose to do much yourself, let alone be employed in the field. It exposes you to mechanical, electrical, and hydraulic systems, and some actual motivation to fabricate or recondition parts in a subsequent shop class.
I get the impression that that would be frowned up on as a deviation from the 'if something scary or unexpected happens, your dealer is your only hope' trajectory that vehicle manufacturers seem hellbent on going down.
For what cheap injection-molded shit sells for once it is a 'math manipulative, aligned with standards!', rather than a generic plastic toy, 3d printing them might actually save money.
I was shocked the first time I idly leafed through an educational supply catalog.
It is true that their arrangement isn't particularly fast (lots of port multipliers, all redundancy operations, whether RAID or something else, are handled in software by the not-especially-distinguished CPU) compared to 42-spindle systems actually designed to wring maximum I/O operations out of HDDs; but it's fast enough, by all accounts, for nearline storage purposes, which is what it was designed for.
It won't save you from heat or humidity; but the little breathing holes in HDDs are very aggressively filtered. The last few I butchered seemed to be some sort of carbon material with extremely fine pores, in a teflon pouch, also presumably with very fine pores, almost a cm thick over the air hole. Dust and whatnot might well play hell with the cooling in a PC, and smoking does pretty dreadful things indeed; but HDDs are serious about what they breathe.
It would not be a major surprise, especially for drives at lower spindle speeds(as opposed to 10 and 15k, which are 'commercial' only, a few obsolete velociraptors excepted), that the economies of scale you get by using the exact same parts wherever possible, as opposed to trying to encheapen the consumer junk slightly, are more attractive than any savings that differentiation by hardware can give you. Especially since 'consumer' still means "must be able to rotate at 7200RPM for prolonged periods, while not head-crashing the head nearly touching the platter surface. This isn't like heavy machinery, where the 'pro' stuff is all fancy steel and the consumer shit is aluminum and nylon gears.
SAS and firmware optimizations? Sure. Actually different bearings or construction tolerances? I hope you like RMAs...
These are the same stupid fucks that use rubber bands around hard drives in their "SAN" storage.
Given that anything remotely serious is based on the premise that you can't trust your hard drives, is a strategy that makes your HDDs incrementally less trustworthy; but much cheaper, actually 'stupid'?
I wouldn't want to use BackBlaze's 'Pods' on a small scale; because part of their low cost is achieved by moving all the redundancy, fault tolerance, etc. into software (and, for a small shop, paying a bit more for fancy hardware that handles that, along with backups, is cheaper than having a software guru on hand); but on a large scale, making the amount of 'overhead' (ie. dollars worth of hardware purchased to support each disk) as low as possible, and just using software (with its high up-front cost; but zero cost to copy an arbitrary number of times) seems pretty reasonable.
Now, if their arrangement was so dodgy that it was actively murdering drives, that'd be another story; but its thermals and electrical supply are good enough that the drives inside get to fail, or not, the same as though they were in any other enclosure, and these enclosures are crazy cheap, so why not?
It's a somewhat ironically timed purchase given that Intel is, even now, trying to shed their IP-TV project, which shares a very similar set of challenges (eg. the core technology behind spitting MPEG4 streams at people is either banal, or done earlier and done better, or patented, by the CDN guys, devices capable of pulling a picture out of an MPEG4 stream and shoving it onto a TV, or displaying it on the tablet, are either selling for peanuts, like the Chromecast, or way ahead of Intel on other factors, like the iPad, and the whole exercise is pretty much 100% dependent on existing TV rightsholders, who have no incentive to do anything except stonewall and then buy the corpse for peanuts.) You'd think that they'd learn from their mistakes, at least occasionally.
Honestly, I'm more than a bit surprised that they were picked up for more than the value of their office furniture, plus whatever it would have cost Intel to just hire their more promising employees piecemeal.
The notion of a 'digital textbook startup' is simultaneously seriously limiting (so, you've developed a hardware and/or software platform that can distribute book-length text documents; but you won't sell it to me unless I'm a student or slinging educational materials?) and guaranteed to bring you into direct conflict with bigger fish who have no interest in your success. Entirely unsurprisingly, the Kno hardware lineup, with bespoke linux-based OS and compatibility only with themselves, was first to die. Was it superior for books, at 14 inches? Very possibly. Was that going to save it in a world where e-ink readers are damn cheap, full android tablets are moderately cheap and widely available, and iPads are the software-ecosystem juggernaught? Hahaha, you make funny joke, yes?
On the content side, they faced the prospect of either DIYing it (doable, if massive, for K-12 sausage-text-to-Standards stuff, nearly impossible against any more specialized area, where they actually want specific books) or cutting licensing agreements with publishers, most of which have their own dreams of digital domination, instant content expiration, and eternal rents, and don't feel like sharing. Kno might have been more competent than those competing options (it would be hard to be less competent, in many cases); but the publishers have the copyrights to the texts Kno needs, so how does that help them?
On the software side, while epub is moderately different from HTML, it's not as though epub readers are expensive or thin on the ground, so what do they have? Yet another epub mangler with some integrated web features nearly indistinguishable from any free blogging site with far too small an audience to attract an idiot with a fat wallet?
It's also worth noting that, at least for the textbooks with some online-readable (often via Flash, not exactly god's gift to accessible text rendering, may it rot in hell) component, the deal often includes some sort of login system that's a moderate size nightmare to administer. In addition to getting the shaft on the EULA, as the above AC notes, the process may include delightful fun like 'create an new set of credentials, entirely distinct from whatever the kiddies use to log in on campus, and then get them all to remember it!' For your convenience, they might deign to accept a specially formatted.xls file (Not xlsx, at least this decade...) for bulk account creation, and if class rosters change later, you can make the teachers sort it out manually...
This is the sort of thing you see in countries deeply afflicted with the European-socialist culture of dependency and waste. First, the state wastefully builds a bunch of white-elephant infrastructure projects, rather than embarking on an Efficient private contract; because it's somebody else's money they are spending.
Then, when those projects stand empty, the state just expects somebody to give them customers (we worked so hard, don't we deserve to succeed?) and then throws up its hands in limp-wristed failure and admits defeat, rather than going out there and making customers through good, old-fashioned, hard work and brutal overcriminalization of all sorts of petty offenses.
This, my friends, is what a sick society looks like. I bet they try to hide their shame by cooking up a bunch of fancy statistics about how good their human development index rankings, life expectancy, and similar ivory-tower nonsense are; but you can't hide moral sickness this profound.
Slashdot Mirror
In a surprising and unexpected move, Google and its partners have removed the recently launched HP Chromebook 11 from shelves.
There are still people in this day an age that are surprised by HP incompetence?
It's a bit surprising because the 'charger' that caused the overheating reports is just an off-the-shelf 'nominally micro USB; but provides more than 500ma' device, as used by virtually any small consumer electronics device, and the Chromebook 11 itself is virtually identical Samsung silicon (also used in Samsung's ARM Chromebook the Series 3), with Google doing much of the driving on software and design; because HP is a load of fuckups.
So, am I surprised by HP incompetence? No. Am I surprised that they failed to get some pacific-rim OEM slave factory to pair a USB power supply that doesn't catch fire with a board design that is virtually identical to a year-old Exynos platform, and a plastics kit derived from the actually-not-awful design of the Chromebook Pixel? Yeah, a bit.
That is pretty shady that they seize his materials, use it to their advantage, but then don't charge him with any crime. That's basically tyranny.
Commies like you have no faith in America. It's not like he had any reasonable expectation of security in his person, papers, and effects or anything, now is it?
"Flawed in principle" is putting it rather mildly. I'd put it as "complete and utter bullshit." Polygraphs are on a level with dousing and voodoo dolls.
We should really just go back to good old Phrenology. Imagine how sophisticated our discernment of the criminal type could be, now that we have rapid 3d scanning technology!
We could even have employees shave their heads, and do a daily scan as they walk in the door. If the bump indicative of 'leaking tendencies' or 'disloyalty' increases in size, we'll know something is up. This plan is practically infallible.
For the enthusiast, the multitude of options are welcome, but for everyone else... ...not so much.
Choice is good, what I dislike is the fragmentation-into-meaninglessness (and sometimes outright intent to deceive, like the cards that take a bottom-of-barrel GPU and throw in an impressive-sounding amount of RAM, albeit pitifully slow DDR on a narrow bus, then slap a big model number and a picture of a CGI chick riding a dragon or something on the box). Right now, the main contenders appear to be HD5450s on the AMD side and GT610s on the Nvidia side, with 2GB of DDR3. On the plus side, the whole damn card sells for just over twice what the RAM alone would cost, so there are worse ways to add video outputs to a computer that doesn't have enough; but those things get pushed, particularly at retail, on the rubes with the 'OMG 2GB!!!!' sell all the time. For the moment, 3GB and higher don't seem to have any such cards)
The cards (especially common in OEM gear and laptops) that have a model number that implies that they are chipset generation N; but are actually slightly upclocked generation N-1 chips, are also a scam.
The one use case that I could see (not that something akin to this hasn't been bodged into place at many large projects already), would be having the authoritative instance of the version control system living on a proper server, with backups and uptime and stuff(this doesn't imply 'cloud'; but if your particular shop isn't capable of it, the cloud salesmen might get you), and having a mechanism to make it easy to kick off compilation of the latest revision, on a machine or machines with a lot more punch than your laptop, and then make the results or horrible errors available to whoever needs to see them. (Again, 'cloud' not required; but may be a sell in some instances.)
Moving a glorified text editor with better highlighting and autocomplete into 'the cloud', when we have never had faster client machines, seems absurd; but I've never encountered a single-disk system secure enough to store something worth more than a pack of post-it notes on, and I don't think anybody has ever sighed contentedly and remarked that "Y'know, I'm genuinely satisfied at how quickly my large projects compile on my laptop!"
It's kind of a dumb question; but 'Azure' is actually a fairly slippery beast.
First it was going to be a totally new and revolutionary Windows, man, that, like, totally redefined what it meant to be 'Windows' and freed your mind from the constraints of a single 'Windows system' as you just ran your win32 applications totally in the cloud.
Since that time, it has moved more in the direction of an EC2-like "just a lot of VMs that you can spool up programmatically without calling your sales rep" structure, with the gradual addition of various more abstracted services (eg. 'MS SQL-compatible database, no need to look at the system underneath it', 'IIS instance of given capacity, no need to look underneath', etc.)
My impression is that the original Grand Architectural Vision of The Future didn't entirely pan out; but they've been fairly fast and aggressive about retooling the parts that did work into a mixture of rental VMs, and abstractions of services that abstract more cleanly than 'arbitrary win32 application' does.
The thing that gets really annoying is what crops up (usually a bit later in a given chipset's lifetime) where the various models simply become impossible to rank in order (without thorough benchmarking), rather than merely needing a lookup table to translate between model numbers and actual specs.
Model numbers, unfortunately, are garbage through and through, but once you get into the realm of "Well, this one has 1GB of RAM; but it's DDR3 on a 64-bit interface, while the other one only has 512; but it's GDDR5, except that this one has 256 shader units at 1.2GHz, and the other one has 300 shader units; but at 900MHz....." it just isn't pretty.
Braille displays are comparatively low resolution, and can be driven in software over serial, USB, or Bluetooth without specialized hardware. (The exception might be older TTY/TDD systems, which use some...eccentric encoding schemes that are of very limited compatibility with many computer modems)
Oh, I'd expect absolutely anything: total stonewalling, claims of 'fair market value' based on averages that include Radio Shack battery-powered RC cars, asserting that 'reasonable and customary' repair costs for a burnt out shell of a relatively exotic car are $2.50 and a pack of Bondo, etc, etc.
I just don't think that his continuing to drive through the first few (very bland) error codes is going to be remotely useful, except possibly as a sort of legalistic word-salad.
On the plus side, people still get to ask that question. We've gotten to the point where it would be relatively inexpensive to 'chip' many of the major FRUs, printer cartridge style, to allow the car to grab a timestamp(and if it has OnStar or an equivalent, it'll be a good timestamp) when a new part is installed, impose time or milage based expiration/replacement intervals, and reject 3rd party components that don't fully implement the authentication system... That would be fun.
It wouldn't surprise me if organizational dynamics come into the picture as well. If researcher X can purchase consumables and services related to his work up to X dollars on his own (subject only to oversight after the fact if somebody raises an eyebrow) and up to Y dollars with a sign off from the lab head or somebody; but would need 6 signatures, university-level approval for the facilities repurposing, and who knows what else, he has a pretty strong incentive to just pay Amazon to do it, even if getting an in-house system makes more sense in the longer term.
On the other side of the coin, if a university is looking for a prestige project that'll look pretty damn cool through the glass when they take tours around, they might get a butch, black, blinkencomputer even if utilization ends up being tepid.
The one (slightly) novel aspect of this, presumably also made possible because the workload parallelized well, is the use of Spot Instances. As the name suggests, these aren't Amazon's standard fixed-price instances; but are rather instances whose price changes according to demand.
You make a bid (specifying maximum price/hour, number and type of instances, availability zones, etc.) If the spot price falls at or below your maximum, your instance starts running. Should it exceed your maximum, your instance gets terminated. Using these things obviously requires a tolerance for server outages far above even the shoddiest physical systems; but if you can divide your problem space into relatively small, discrete, chunks, and get the results off the individual servers once computed, you won't lose more than a single chunk per shutdown, and spot instances can be crazy cheap, depending on demand at the time. My impression is that Amazon offers them whenever they don't have enough reserved instances to fill a given area, and will pretty much keep offering them as long as they pay better than they cost in additional electricity and cooling, so if you are willing to bottom feed, and potentially wait, there are some bargains to be had.
Filtration would be pretty trivial, at least if the patents on having an enclosed fabrication surface have expired...
How about auto repair? I think it's a good place to start with mechanical skills because everybody owns a car, and knowing some basics will save you money even if you don't choose to do much yourself, let alone be employed in the field. It exposes you to mechanical, electrical, and hydraulic systems, and some actual motivation to fabricate or recondition parts in a subsequent shop class.
I get the impression that that would be frowned up on as a deviation from the 'if something scary or unexpected happens, your dealer is your only hope' trajectory that vehicle manufacturers seem hellbent on going down.
Do you want Our Children to be left behind in the tough, competitive, world of actively destructive management for want of dreadful powerpoint skills?
For what cheap injection-molded shit sells for once it is a 'math manipulative, aligned with standards!', rather than a generic plastic toy, 3d printing them might actually save money.
I was shocked the first time I idly leafed through an educational supply catalog.
It is true that their arrangement isn't particularly fast (lots of port multipliers, all redundancy operations, whether RAID or something else, are handled in software by the not-especially-distinguished CPU) compared to 42-spindle systems actually designed to wring maximum I/O operations out of HDDs; but it's fast enough, by all accounts, for nearline storage purposes, which is what it was designed for.
It won't save you from heat or humidity; but the little breathing holes in HDDs are very aggressively filtered. The last few I butchered seemed to be some sort of carbon material with extremely fine pores, in a teflon pouch, also presumably with very fine pores, almost a cm thick over the air hole. Dust and whatnot might well play hell with the cooling in a PC, and smoking does pretty dreadful things indeed; but HDDs are serious about what they breathe.
It would not be a major surprise, especially for drives at lower spindle speeds(as opposed to 10 and 15k, which are 'commercial' only, a few obsolete velociraptors excepted), that the economies of scale you get by using the exact same parts wherever possible, as opposed to trying to encheapen the consumer junk slightly, are more attractive than any savings that differentiation by hardware can give you. Especially since 'consumer' still means "must be able to rotate at 7200RPM for prolonged periods, while not head-crashing the head nearly touching the platter surface. This isn't like heavy machinery, where the 'pro' stuff is all fancy steel and the consumer shit is aluminum and nylon gears.
SAS and firmware optimizations? Sure. Actually different bearings or construction tolerances? I hope you like RMAs...
These are the same stupid fucks that use rubber bands around hard drives in their "SAN" storage.
Given that anything remotely serious is based on the premise that you can't trust your hard drives, is a strategy that makes your HDDs incrementally less trustworthy; but much cheaper, actually 'stupid'?
I wouldn't want to use BackBlaze's 'Pods' on a small scale; because part of their low cost is achieved by moving all the redundancy, fault tolerance, etc. into software (and, for a small shop, paying a bit more for fancy hardware that handles that, along with backups, is cheaper than having a software guru on hand); but on a large scale, making the amount of 'overhead' (ie. dollars worth of hardware purchased to support each disk) as low as possible, and just using software (with its high up-front cost; but zero cost to copy an arbitrary number of times) seems pretty reasonable.
Now, if their arrangement was so dodgy that it was actively murdering drives, that'd be another story; but its thermals and electrical supply are good enough that the drives inside get to fail, or not, the same as though they were in any other enclosure, and these enclosures are crazy cheap, so why not?
It's a somewhat ironically timed purchase given that Intel is, even now, trying to shed their IP-TV project, which shares a very similar set of challenges (eg. the core technology behind spitting MPEG4 streams at people is either banal, or done earlier and done better, or patented, by the CDN guys, devices capable of pulling a picture out of an MPEG4 stream and shoving it onto a TV, or displaying it on the tablet, are either selling for peanuts, like the Chromecast, or way ahead of Intel on other factors, like the iPad, and the whole exercise is pretty much 100% dependent on existing TV rightsholders, who have no incentive to do anything except stonewall and then buy the corpse for peanuts.) You'd think that they'd learn from their mistakes, at least occasionally.
Honestly, I'm more than a bit surprised that they were picked up for more than the value of their office furniture, plus whatever it would have cost Intel to just hire their more promising employees piecemeal.
The notion of a 'digital textbook startup' is simultaneously seriously limiting (so, you've developed a hardware and/or software platform that can distribute book-length text documents; but you won't sell it to me unless I'm a student or slinging educational materials?) and guaranteed to bring you into direct conflict with bigger fish who have no interest in your success. Entirely unsurprisingly, the Kno hardware lineup, with bespoke linux-based OS and compatibility only with themselves, was first to die. Was it superior for books, at 14 inches? Very possibly. Was that going to save it in a world where e-ink readers are damn cheap, full android tablets are moderately cheap and widely available, and iPads are the software-ecosystem juggernaught? Hahaha, you make funny joke, yes?
On the content side, they faced the prospect of either DIYing it (doable, if massive, for K-12 sausage-text-to-Standards stuff, nearly impossible against any more specialized area, where they actually want specific books) or cutting licensing agreements with publishers, most of which have their own dreams of digital domination, instant content expiration, and eternal rents, and don't feel like sharing. Kno might have been more competent than those competing options (it would be hard to be less competent, in many cases); but the publishers have the copyrights to the texts Kno needs, so how does that help them?
On the software side, while epub is moderately different from HTML, it's not as though epub readers are expensive or thin on the ground, so what do they have? Yet another epub mangler with some integrated web features nearly indistinguishable from any free blogging site with far too small an audience to attract an idiot with a fat wallet?
It's also worth noting that, at least for the textbooks with some online-readable (often via Flash, not exactly god's gift to accessible text rendering, may it rot in hell) component, the deal often includes some sort of login system that's a moderate size nightmare to administer. In addition to getting the shaft on the EULA, as the above AC notes, the process may include delightful fun like 'create an new set of credentials, entirely distinct from whatever the kiddies use to log in on campus, and then get them all to remember it!' For your convenience, they might deign to accept a specially formatted .xls file (Not xlsx, at least this decade...) for bulk account creation, and if class rosters change later, you can make the teachers sort it out manually...
I wonder how much extra it would cost to get a Half Life HEV "User Death Imminent. Seek Medical Attention." message?
This is the sort of thing you see in countries deeply afflicted with the European-socialist culture of dependency and waste. First, the state wastefully builds a bunch of white-elephant infrastructure projects, rather than embarking on an Efficient private contract; because it's somebody else's money they are spending.
Then, when those projects stand empty, the state just expects somebody to give them customers (we worked so hard, don't we deserve to succeed?) and then throws up its hands in limp-wristed failure and admits defeat, rather than going out there and making customers through good, old-fashioned, hard work and brutal overcriminalization of all sorts of petty offenses.
This, my friends, is what a sick society looks like. I bet they try to hide their shame by cooking up a bunch of fancy statistics about how good their human development index rankings, life expectancy, and similar ivory-tower nonsense are; but you can't hide moral sickness this profound.