As the AppleInsider article says, you launch it by holding down the "option" key and clicking on the Wi-Fi "menu extra" and selecting the "Open Wi-Fi Diagnostics..." menu item. It's "hidden" because it's in an option-click menu, not because it's in/System/Library/CoreServices (it's in/System/Library/CoreServices because it's intended to be launched from the aforementioned menu).
In a number of cases, option+click will bring up a menu with more items than the menu you get by just clicking has. I'm not sure whether Apple document that anywhere, so I'm not sure whether that stuff is "hidden" in the sense of being something Apple doesn't tell you about at all or "hidden" in the sense that you don't get it by default.
Is there a menu item in the menu for the Wi-Fi menu extra (either when you click on it or when you option-click on it) that starts the Wi-Fi diagnostics?
If so, that might be why it's stuffed under CoreServices - the intent is to run it that way, not by double-clicking on it or running it from Launchpad.
I've downloaded and used a couple of Wifi diagnostics applications, but it's never occurred to me to look in System/Library/CoreServices for applications. So yes, hidden. It should be in Applications/Utilities, along with other apps that not every user would understand like Console and RAID Utility.
Is there a menu item in the menu for the Wi-Fi menu extra (either when you click on it or when you option-click on it) that starts the Wi-Fi diagnostics? If so, that might be why it's stuffed under CoreServices - the intent is to run it that way, not by double-clicking on it or running it from Launchpad.
They have a kernel. If you're referring to GNU HURD, that's been deprioritized because as Mr. Stallman wrote in a Reddit interview, "Linux works ok as a kernel." Linux is one of many third-party components of a GNU system.
If by "third-party components" you mean "stuff not from the GNU project", what constitutes "a GNU system", if "a GNU system" includes critical non-GNU projects? The GNU project as a producer of an all-GNU operating system may never succeed, but the GNU project as a producer of:
a large number of very useful free software projects;
at least some widely-adopted extensions of the UN*X API and user interface (e.g., getopt_long(), implemented independently in at least some *BSDs and Mac OS X as well as Solaris and possibly some other commercial UNIXes);
and as a promoter of the notion of free software is definitely a success.
At the beginning of the GNU Project, I imagined that we would develop the whole GNU system, then release it as a whole. That is not how it happened.
Since each component of the GNU system was implemented on a Unix system, each component could run on Unix systems long before a complete GNU system existed. Some of these programs became popular, and users began extending them and porting them—to the various incompatible versions of Unix, and sometimes to other systems as well.
The process made these programs much more powerful, and attracted both funds and contributors to the GNU Project. But it probably also delayed completion of a minimal working system by several years, as GNU developers' time was put into maintaining these ports and adding features to the existing components, rather than moving on to write one missing component after another.
so one could argue that the real result of the GNU project is not the intended complete operating system but, instead, a collection of pieces of free software that have been adopted by a number of operating systems, including Linux distributions, the *BSDs, Mac OS X, and perhaps other commercial UNIXes.
Those operating systems are, however, not built with a 100% GNU userland. So, at best, Guile might, at some point, be the extension language for all pieces of software from the GNU project, and perhaps even for many pieces of free software not from the GNU project (most of it is licensed under the LGPL, so even non-free software written for environments that provide Guile could use it as an extension language, as long as they avoid GPLed parts such as the readline module), but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for an operating system where it's the extension language.
Perhaps when Andy Wingo argued that Guile should be the extension language for GNU, he meant "for all pieces of software from the GNU project", but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for it to be the extension language for an entire operating system - relative technical merits of various languages nonwithstanding, the world will probably have to live with the languages that Wingo asserts "are at the height of [their adoption curves] and beginning [their] descent" or that "will fall out of favor" for quite a while. Perhaps he's right, and Python's fading away and JavaScript will become a legacy language; if so, whether what replaces them is some flavor of LISP is something to be determined by waiting and watching. After all, Worse is Better.
Remember when that city in California spent $1,200,000,000 to move a bush to protect it? Does this sound reasonable?
No, it doesn't, which is why I'd need a citation to believe that they spent over a billion dollars to move a bush.
For the employee to demand a raise after training is grossly unfair to the business.
So? The marketplace isn't about "fair". If you didn't make the employee sign a contract obliging them to pay back the cost of training them if they didn't stay there more than N months, that's not the employee's problem, that's your problem.
(once they are competent they want pay raises or leave for other jobs)
In case you weren't aware, that's called a "free market". Yes, sometimes a free market can cut against the interests of a business; if a customer thinks you're charging too much, they have this annoying tendency to go elsewhere if they can, and if an employee thinks you're not paying them enough, they have a similar annoying tendency. If they can get another job that pays more, you might want to treat that as a sign that you're not paying enough.
If they sell of their computer business what do they think they can sell?
"Personal computer business" != "computer business". Their Q3 2011 financial review indicates that, in earnings from operations in the quarter ending July 31, 2011, the rest of the computer business - "Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking" - was third, after the services business and the printer/scanner business, and ahead of the PC business.
According to the Open Group which owns the UNIX trademark and conduct certification, OS X 10.5 on Intel and OS X 10.6 are certified UNIX. OS X is also POSIX compliant.
Yes, I'm quite aware of that; perhaps I should've said "regardless of whether you're supposed to call it UNIX" rather than trying too hard to parallel the "even the ones I'm not supposed to call UNIX" of the person to whom I was responding.
From what they've mentioned in their press releases and what's in their products and services page, what hardware remains is servers and storage, printers/scanners/all-in-ones and supplies for them, networking devices, and some other miscellanea (calculators, monitors, etc.).
What the heck software is HP shipping that hasn't to do with their own hardware?
I'm not sure - the stuff I've found on their software site doesn't do a great job of saying what platforms the software runs on, although some of the stuff for mail archiving on Microsoft Exchange seems to at least hint that it runs on Windows servers (some of which might be theirs, at least unless and until they spin off that group, but not all of which are necessarily theirs).
It's becoming more and more of a joke to keep the same name. Their business got nothing to do with Hewlett nor Packard.
William Hewlett was CEO until 1979, and David Packard was chairman of the board until 1993 (except for a couple of years when he was a deputy secretary of defense). That period includes a bunch of the "business computer" stuff (HP 3000, UNIX boxes) which HP haven't spoken of divesting. Dumping the PC business is hardly the action that kicks H&P to the curb; dumping the instrument business maybe, but not the PC business.
Where in the physorg.com link does it say they're going to stop making phones and tablets? It does say they are expanding where webOS can play (which has been talked about for a while), but I didn't see anything about stopping production on TouchPads & whatever they call their phones now. What am I missing?
HP will discontinue operations for webOS devices, specifically the TouchPad and webOS phones. The devices have not met internal milestones and financial targets. HP will continue to explore options to optimize the value of webOS software going forward.
A company spin off is a very, very different thing from simply closing down the PC factories and shredding the plans.
But both of them result in Hewlett-Packard no longer manufacturing personal computers, so I, at least, think of both of them as "HP exiting the PC business". Perhaps you don't, and perhaps some others don't, but perhaps some others do, e.g. Larry Dignan or IBM's CTO or the authors of this piece.
Thanks to what some would call an unfair advantage in the UNIX-centric nature of the entire internet protocol suite, UNIX gained an early lead in internet sites (this was before the "web", you know)
So what about it was "UNIX-centric"? (No, "protocols like FTP were text-based, so they were UNIX-centric" isn't it - Dating back at least as far as RFC 454, in 1973, when UNIX was about 2 years old and not very ARPANETted, a text-command-based FTP was being proposed.)
Even though Apple and Google were taking UNIX systems, stripping the userspace, and replacing it with strange "mobile-optimized" front-ends,
At least for Apple, the "userspace" you're referring to presumably refers to the UI, rather than, say, the system library, which, in iOS is very much like the Mac OS X system library, i.e. it's what a UNIX person would call a libc (even if it's called libSystem). For Google, it's a bit different blah blah blah Dalvik blah blah blah, but at least as I read What is the NDK?, it sounds as if they're offering at least some low-level UNIX APIs to native applications:
[The NDK] provides a set of system headers for stable native APIs that are guaranteed to be supported in all later releases of the platform:
libc (C library) headers
libm (math library) headers
...
So what is this? We've seen 3 decades+ of growth, and now... it all ends here. Is there such a thing as "peak UNIX"? Cause this sure looks like it from here. The world has moved on, Moore's law has finally given us enough computing power to generate all the shiny bling we need to blind ourselves to what's under the hood.
"What's under the hood" is still UNIX (in the "even if you're not supposed to call it UNIX", i.e. the "little if any of it is based on AT&T UNIX code and it wasn't certified by running it against the Single UNIX Specification validation suite, but it's still recognizably UNIX in its the low-level APIs", sense) for the two fastest growing smartphone OSes, the top tablet OS (same as one of the two smartphone OSes), and at least one of the other tablet OSes (same as the other smartphone OS). Most application developers for those OSes probably don't end up using any of the low-level UNIX APIs in their code, however.
To what does "that" refer? "a... partial separation of PSG from HP through a spin-off or other transaction" might not be considered an exit, but would you truly not consider "a full... separation of PSG from HP through a spin-off or other transaction" not to be an exit?
Yeah...remember how Motorola split into two companies a while back? Obviously not. Well, Google bought the division of the company that's devoted to smart phones, Motorola Mobility. Has fuck all to do with their set top boxes. Try doing at least the minimal amount of research required to actually make a point before you try making one
In the other patent application they mention "a new document-format-preferred key (as a MIME media type), which enables the printer to specify a "preferred" document format out of all of the document formats that are supported by the printer", which is a new IPP key, and also mention "a new "URF-supported key" to a discovery protocol and a transport protocol. More specifically, some embodiments have added a new URF-supported key to the discovery protocol as part of a Bonjour(TM) TXT record, and have also added an analogous URF-supported key to the transport protocol as a new printer description attribute for the IPP protocol", where URF is presumably the Universal Raster Format mentioned in other comments. It also mentions "a new device-independent bitmap container for printer data".
If the patent is granted, I suspect licensing it to put into your printer will be easy and cheap, to encourage lots of printers to support it, but licensing it to put into, for example, your smartphone OS might not be quite so easy or cheap.
How in the name of Obama's butthole do you manage to put a cloud service between your PC and the printer which is DIRECTLY ATTACHED to it via a USB cable which shouldn't even need to be connected to a network at all?
To quote the first patent application:
[0051] FIGS. 5A and 5B illustrate flow charts for alternative techniques for cloud printing in accordance with the disclosed embodiments. (These flow charts illustrate operations which take place during the driverless printing process which occurs in step 312 of FIG. 3.) Referring to FIG. 5A, mobile device 102 first sends a print job to cloud 104 (step 502). Next, a server within cloud 104 generates corresponding printer data for the selected printer and sends the printer data directly to the selected printer (step 504). Unfortunately, this technique may have issues with establishing channels through firewalls. The printer will generally not accept a print job from the cloud unless a channel is first established between a server in the cloud and the printer.
[0052] To remedy this problem, the printer data can be returned to the mobile device so that the mobile device can forward the printer data to the printer. More specifically, referring to FIG. 5B, mobile device 102 first sends a print job to cloud 104 (step 512). Next, one or more servers within cloud 104 generate corresponding printer data for the selected printer and return the printer data to mobile device 102 (step 514). Finally, mobile device 102 forwards the printer data to the selected printer (step 516). Because a channel already exists between the mobile computing device and the cloud and between the mobile computing device and the printer, there is no need to set up an additional channel between the cloud and the printer.
Before, or after, Apple hired Michael Sweet? If before, then it'd been changed to being GPLed before Apple hired him. If after, then Apple changed it to GPL after hiring him.
Could it be that filing patent applications relating to printers by a company that used to make printers could be a hint, that maybe, just maybe, they intend to start making printers again?
I rather doubt that it is. It's a patent application relating to printers by a company that makes machines that are, sadly, sometimes forced to send data to printers. The fact that, at one point, they made printers (or, at least, sold printers on which they did some design work), and then thought better of it, is probably particularly relevant here.
Examples? Maybe I have just lucked out, but none of the printers I've bought (or even looked at purchasing) in the last 10 or 12 years have lacked PostScript support, and I've bought low-end, consumer-grade printers.
Slashdot Mirror
As the AppleInsider article says, you launch it by holding down the "option" key and clicking on the Wi-Fi "menu extra" and selecting the "Open Wi-Fi Diagnostics..." menu item. It's "hidden" because it's in an option-click menu, not because it's in /System/Library/CoreServices (it's in /System/Library/CoreServices because it's intended to be launched from the aforementioned menu).
In a number of cases, option+click will bring up a menu with more items than the menu you get by just clicking has. I'm not sure whether Apple document that anywhere, so I'm not sure whether that stuff is "hidden" in the sense of being something Apple doesn't tell you about at all or "hidden" in the sense that you don't get it by default.
Is there a menu item in the menu for the Wi-Fi menu extra (either when you click on it or when you option-click on it) that starts the Wi-Fi diagnostics?
Yes.
If so, that might be why it's stuffed under CoreServices - the intent is to run it that way, not by double-clicking on it or running it from Launchpad.
Yes.
On a separate note, this could make wireless hacking much easier if someone could figure out how it works.
How which part of it works? The "capture raw frames" part works by opening one of the deep dark secret "BPF devices", performing the appropriate ioctls on it, and reading from it, or maybe letting the deep dark secret "libpcap library" do that for you, sort of like the deep dark secret "tcpdump program" does.
I've downloaded and used a couple of Wifi diagnostics applications, but it's never occurred to me to look in System/Library/CoreServices for applications. So yes, hidden. It should be in Applications/Utilities, along with other apps that not every user would understand like Console and RAID Utility.
Is there a menu item in the menu for the Wi-Fi menu extra (either when you click on it or when you option-click on it) that starts the Wi-Fi diagnostics? If so, that might be why it's stuffed under CoreServices - the intent is to run it that way, not by double-clicking on it or running it from Launchpad.
They have a kernel. If you're referring to GNU HURD, that's been deprioritized because as Mr. Stallman wrote in a Reddit interview, "Linux works ok as a kernel." Linux is one of many third-party components of a GNU system.
If by "third-party components" you mean "stuff not from the GNU project", what constitutes "a GNU system", if "a GNU system" includes critical non-GNU projects? The GNU project as a producer of an all-GNU operating system may never succeed, but the GNU project as a producer of:
and as a promoter of the notion of free software is definitely a success.
The GNU Hacker's Meeting page has "GNU Operating System" at the top. The GNU Operating System was intended to be "a complete Unix-compatible software system", with "all improvements that are convenient, based on our experience with other operating systems".
However, that's not what happened:
so one could argue that the real result of the GNU project is not the intended complete operating system but, instead, a collection of pieces of free software that have been adopted by a number of operating systems, including Linux distributions, the *BSDs, Mac OS X, and perhaps other commercial UNIXes.
Those operating systems are, however, not built with a 100% GNU userland. So, at best, Guile might, at some point, be the extension language for all pieces of software from the GNU project, and perhaps even for many pieces of free software not from the GNU project (most of it is licensed under the LGPL, so even non-free software written for environments that provide Guile could use it as an extension language, as long as they avoid GPLed parts such as the readline module), but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for an operating system where it's the extension language.
Perhaps when Andy Wingo argued that Guile should be the extension language for GNU, he meant "for all pieces of software from the GNU project", but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for it to be the extension language for an entire operating system - relative technical merits of various languages nonwithstanding, the world will probably have to live with the languages that Wingo asserts "are at the height of [their adoption curves] and beginning [their] descent" or that "will fall out of favor" for quite a while. Perhaps he's right, and Python's fading away and JavaScript will become a legacy language; if so, whether what replaces them is some flavor of LISP is something to be determined by waiting and watching. After all, Worse is Better.
Ah - Tea Party airhead - right?
Nope, just somebody who's never gonna give you up and never gonna let you down. (Hint, hint.)
Remember when that city in California spent $1,200,000,000 to move a bush to protect it? Does this sound reasonable?
No, it doesn't, which is why I'd need a citation to believe that they spent over a billion dollars to move a bush.
For the employee to demand a raise after training is grossly unfair to the business.
So? The marketplace isn't about "fair". If you didn't make the employee sign a contract obliging them to pay back the cost of training them if they didn't stay there more than N months, that's not the employee's problem, that's your problem.
(once they are competent they want pay raises or leave for other jobs)
In case you weren't aware, that's called a "free market". Yes, sometimes a free market can cut against the interests of a business; if a customer thinks you're charging too much, they have this annoying tendency to go elsewhere if they can, and if an employee thinks you're not paying them enough, they have a similar annoying tendency. If they can get another job that pays more, you might want to treat that as a sign that you're not paying enough.
If they sell of their computer business what do they think they can sell?
"Personal computer business" != "computer business". Their Q3 2011 financial review indicates that, in earnings from operations in the quarter ending July 31, 2011, the rest of the computer business - "Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking" - was third, after the services business and the printer/scanner business, and ahead of the PC business.
According to the Open Group which owns the UNIX trademark and conduct certification, OS X 10.5 on Intel and OS X 10.6 are certified UNIX. OS X is also POSIX compliant.
Yes, I'm quite aware of that; perhaps I should've said "regardless of whether you're supposed to call it UNIX" rather than trying too hard to parallel the "even the ones I'm not supposed to call UNIX" of the person to whom I was responding.
So what remains is servers?
From what they've mentioned in their press releases and what's in their products and services page, what hardware remains is servers and storage, printers/scanners/all-in-ones and supplies for them, networking devices, and some other miscellanea (calculators, monitors, etc.).
What the heck software is HP shipping that hasn't to do with their own hardware?
I'm not sure - the stuff I've found on their software site doesn't do a great job of saying what platforms the software runs on, although some of the stuff for mail archiving on Microsoft Exchange seems to at least hint that it runs on Windows servers (some of which might be theirs, at least unless and until they spin off that group, but not all of which are necessarily theirs).
It's becoming more and more of a joke to keep the same name. Their business got nothing to do with Hewlett nor Packard.
William Hewlett was CEO until 1979, and David Packard was chairman of the board until 1993 (except for a couple of years when he was a deputy secretary of defense). That period includes a bunch of the "business computer" stuff (HP 3000, UNIX boxes) which HP haven't spoken of divesting. Dumping the PC business is hardly the action that kicks H&P to the curb; dumping the instrument business maybe, but not the PC business.
Where in the physorg.com link does it say they're going to stop making phones and tablets? It does say they are expanding where webOS can play (which has been talked about for a while), but I didn't see anything about stopping production on TouchPads & whatever they call their phones now. What am I missing?
You're missing the HP press release, which says
A company spin off is a very, very different thing from simply closing down the PC factories and shredding the plans.
But both of them result in Hewlett-Packard no longer manufacturing personal computers, so I, at least, think of both of them as "HP exiting the PC business". Perhaps you don't, and perhaps some others don't, but perhaps some others do, e.g. Larry Dignan or IBM's CTO or the authors of this piece.
Thanks to what some would call an unfair advantage in the UNIX-centric nature of the entire internet protocol suite, UNIX gained an early lead in internet sites (this was before the "web", you know)
So what about it was "UNIX-centric"? (No, "protocols like FTP were text-based, so they were UNIX-centric" isn't it - Dating back at least as far as RFC 454, in 1973, when UNIX was about 2 years old and not very ARPANETted, a text-command-based FTP was being proposed.)
Even though Apple and Google were taking UNIX systems, stripping the userspace, and replacing it with strange "mobile-optimized" front-ends,
At least for Apple, the "userspace" you're referring to presumably refers to the UI, rather than, say, the system library, which, in iOS is very much like the Mac OS X system library, i.e. it's what a UNIX person would call a libc (even if it's called libSystem). For Google, it's a bit different blah blah blah Dalvik blah blah blah, but at least as I read What is the NDK?, it sounds as if they're offering at least some low-level UNIX APIs to native applications:
So what is this? We've seen 3 decades+ of growth, and now... it all ends here. Is there such a thing as "peak UNIX"? Cause this sure looks like it from here. The world has moved on, Moore's law has finally given us enough computing power to generate all the shiny bling we need to blind ourselves to what's under the hood.
"What's under the hood" is still UNIX (in the "even if you're not supposed to call it UNIX", i.e. the "little if any of it is based on AT&T UNIX code and it wasn't certified by running it against the Single UNIX Specification validation suite, but it's still recognizably UNIX in its the low-level APIs", sense) for the two fastest growing smartphone OSes, the top tablet OS (same as one of the two smartphone OSes), and at least one of the other tablet OSes (same as the other smartphone OS). Most application developers for those OSes probably don't end up using any of the low-level UNIX APIs in their code, however.
That's not an exit though.
To what does "that" refer? "a ... partial separation of PSG from HP through a spin-off or other transaction" might not be considered an exit, but would you truly not consider "a full ... separation of PSG from HP through a spin-off or other transaction" not to be an exit?
Yeah...remember how Motorola split into two companies a while back? Obviously not. Well, Google bought the division of the company that's devoted to smart phones, Motorola Mobility. Has fuck all to do with their set top boxes. Try doing at least the minimal amount of research required to actually make a point before you try making one
Sounds like a good idea. How about starting by looking at the Motorola Mobility home page, and then at the all consumer products page for Motorola Mobility, and then at, say the home digital video page. Then, if you want to argue "butbutbut that's not Motorola Mobility!", try going to the Motorola US home page, and then click on the Motorola Mobility link to see that it takes you to the aforementioned home page, then go back and follow the Motorola Solutions link and see that it takes you to the page for the other one of those two companies, which has a different domain name.
So apple patents printing...
Nope. You obviously haven't Read The FIne Patent Applications.
It's Patent Application 20110194140 ; here's the application.
And the other one is Patent Application 20110194124.
So where in the patent application do they mention a new protocol? They do mention an existing protocol....
In the other patent application they mention "a new document-format-preferred key (as a MIME media type), which enables the printer to specify a "preferred" document format out of all of the document formats that are supported by the printer", which is a new IPP key, and also mention "a new "URF-supported key" to a discovery protocol and a transport protocol. More specifically, some embodiments have added a new URF-supported key to the discovery protocol as part of a Bonjour(TM) TXT record, and have also added an analogous URF-supported key to the transport protocol as a new printer description attribute for the IPP protocol", where URF is presumably the Universal Raster Format mentioned in other comments. It also mentions "a new device-independent bitmap container for printer data".
If the patent is granted, I suspect licensing it to put into your printer will be easy and cheap, to encourage lots of printers to support it, but licensing it to put into, for example, your smartphone OS might not be quite so easy or cheap.
How in the name of Obama's butthole do you manage to put a cloud service between your PC and the printer which is DIRECTLY ATTACHED to it via a USB cable which shouldn't even need to be connected to a network at all?
To quote the first patent application:
CUPS was BSD licensed.
Before, or after, Apple hired Michael Sweet? If before, then it'd been changed to being GPLed before Apple hired him. If after, then Apple changed it to GPL after hiring him.
Could it be that filing patent applications relating to printers by a company that used to make printers could be a hint, that maybe, just maybe, they intend to start making printers again?
I rather doubt that it is. It's a patent application relating to printers by a company that makes machines that are, sadly, sometimes forced to send data to printers. The fact that, at one point, they made printers (or, at least, sold printers on which they did some design work), and then thought better of it, is probably particularly relevant here.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Printing_Protocol
You mean the Internet Printing Protocol to which both the first patent application and the second application refer?
CUPS is based on it...
You mean the CUPS that the first inventor in the inventor lists for both applications wrote?
Examples? Maybe I have just lucked out, but none of the printers I've bought (or even looked at purchasing) in the last 10 or 12 years have lacked PostScript support, and I've bought low-end, consumer-grade printers.
Well, the specs on the HP OfficeJet 4500 only mention HP's PCL, not PostScript (and they do mention it, as well as HP PCL, for the HP DesignJet T2300). The HP DeskJet 1000 specs also don't mention PostScript. Epson doesn't mention PostScript as a language for the Epson Artisan 725 All-in-One Printer - Arctic Edition. Maybe you've just blown off the lowest-end printers.