Wasn't it just 17 months ago that the Black Sunday happened where the cloners got their technological comings up? At the time there was a hugh 'go DirectTV' for running the technology and staying out of the much less certain legal system?
In this turn of events, all that will win are the suits.
HP is slowly rotting. We'll clearly see huge layoffs soon. Examples:
In a major bid for PCs recently (1000+ systems) they were 150+% of the lowest bid. So much for what one sales executive said in the press, "we will loose no bids because of price."
Shipping of I2 products started amazingly late.
The ever-diminishing quality of Scanjets. "Oh you mean that you used it a couple of hours a day? They aren't designed for that!", said the help desk. Funny, the old ones were. I'd like those designs updated and then leave the hell alone. And yes, sell parts for the damn things so when the bulb dies we just replace the bulb, not the whole scanner.
Even their own folks admit that the Laserjet 9000 mechanics are awful.
It all adds up to HP management not sticking to their core business, but instead messing around with mergers and other things they don't understand.
I have been hopeing that someone would purchase the corpse of HP calculators and return to the innovation that made them great. They'll have to restart the IR printers and the IO cards. They'll also have to reassemble the team that made the designs things one took months to grow into. Making HP calculators a success would be a delightful proof of concept that Carlie is a by the numbers, not by the ideas manager. HP was made by ideas, not numbers.
Soon Dell+Lexmark will have gotten the costs down, the quality up and the delivered cost per page halved. Then HP will not be able to live off the cash cow that printing and imaging currently is. Then there will be trouble in the core of the business that no amount of MBA money manipulation will be able to fix. Ideas still count in high tech, a thought lost on the HP front office.
Finally, I was very bumbed that Agilent didn't get to keep the HP name. The HP way is still alive over there. HP should have lost the right to have the name of two wonderful engineers in their name when they spun Agilent off. Talk about dumping the date that brought you to the dance!
HP will survive; they have too many bright people and a good portfolio of Intellectual Property. The path to survival is going to get really really ugly and there is little now that can be done to prevent that.
We must always remember this story is written by John Markov, whose career is based in part on a set of half truths about Kevin Mitnick (who is by no means a saint) and other spin-based technology reporting. Some of the dotcom frenzy could have been moderated if he'd reported truth instead of illusion from his bully pulpit.
Given the previous mis-reporting (and I was around in the early 70s) I take issue with any one person or organization getting 'credit' for personal computing. It was time, in the industry, to do this. Already in tbe back of Scienctific American were half a dozen companies advertisting mini-computers that were targeted to a single researcher. I was on PDP 8s and soon thereafter PDP 11s which were mostly being used to support single people.
Allen Kay shold get credit for bringing to prominance the windowing environments that most of us now use.
Though an aside to the actual product, as I pay attention to netstumbler results I've come to the conclusion there is only so-much bandwidth in the WiFi sky and in technological areas (like offices or dense housing) there are soon (if not already) not enough channels in the WiFi system to do all the things that people are talking about doing...
Do we need a WiFi NetRadio adding to the constant din of packets in the limited bandwidth available?
It likely was destroyed. These kinds of events are such that they need PROOF that it was destroyed and that the system is still, keys not withstanding, secure.
Creeps like the Pollards are much more of a risk to encryption systems than this problem.
As to the parinoid amongst you, the shuttle's have used some military com technology since nearly their inception. The military paid part of the initial development and that was one of the consessions that NASA made to keep them happy. Do remember that there was a plan, up till Challenger, to launch from the CA coast for missions that were all military.
I constructively edited their form letter to deleted the offending parts, added a little new wording about SPAM and pushed send. I did give them a SPAM track email address which will help determine when they sell my name (regardless of their contact protection claims).
I urge all of you to send material from their site, but be sure to edit to make their words your own. Be sure to suggest measures to help with the unsolicited email industry which has to be worth at least $1,000,000,000,000 a year to the economy.
I'd much prefer that they spent the money cloning the real thing from DNA... Now THAT would be interesting!
-- Multics
Re:A few flying platform and jetpack projects
on
The End of Solotrek
·
· Score: 2
(hmmm, flambait...)
Hiller had one killer problem... flight duration (90 SECONDS).
SoloTrek was claiming 1.5-2hr flight durations.
which would have made their system viable for all sorts of odd things from military to power line inspection and repair. Oh and their fuel wasn't ultra vile like Hiller's was.
Try building one of these things, then bitch... the control theory alone is a major problem.
-- Multics
Re:It Harasses People with Visually Disabilities
on
Next-Gen Pop-up Ads
·
· Score: 2
Where is the US American's with Disabilities Act when you need it? Or w3.org bitching or bobby.cast.org emailing them their unsatisfactory output?
Perhaps google could offer a new service that only indexes sites that are bobby & w3 safe? that would help us all enforce good behavior on the WWW.
In all seriousness, these mouse-over events are a major pain in the ass for consumers that have accessibility problems. I'll be glad to route their advertisement servers to null. Anyone got a robust set of names?
It would appear that someone at Microsoft learned how to read -- say for example:
Computer Lib/Dream Machines [originally printed circa 1977]
which describes
Dynabook.
At least they're smart enough to implement it coherently unlike a dozen or so who've tried previously. It sounds like this product is about 70% of what a Dynabook is supposed to be.
First, this is not news. Linux has been the O/S of choice for the BlueGene family of computers since the beginning.
Second, the AIX roadmap goes out to at least 2007 (five year planning window). So don't be throwing away your SMIT knowledge quite yet. I'd be very surprised if there wasn't significant AIX work being done as far out as 2010.
IBM has at least us$20B in AIX and as a result it is very mature. They're putting nearly us$1B a year into Linux (JFS being just one wonderful thing ported). It will still be a while before they can bet the company on Linux. Do also keep in mind that AIX has at least a 15 year head start on Linux.
I've worked with librarians all over the midwest (USA) and as a group they're far far behind on nearly every basis.
It is clear that just as computer geeks naturally select themselves as computer people, librarians do the same. They like books, research, and then tend to be very rigid in their outlook on work and life.
In addition to their natural tendancies, the
American Library Association has not helped matters. It is controlled by a bunch of introspective, vision-less, and rigid nay-sayers. Go to the ALA web site and see what kinds of literature they are currently
offering! See anything about how to design cataloging systems? See much about information management? nope. Then, beyond that, ALA's been very successful locking up big chunks of their corner of the world with locking up job descriptions to ALA accreditation which requires a visionless curriculum.
I think it is hopeless until most current library managers a retired and a new crop that is not afraid of innovation and change come to the fore front.
So do I wish Librarians would come to the information party in a contemporary way? Absolutely! Alas I have very little hope that it will happen anytime in the near future.
-- Multics
P.S. at a recent conference I attended, one of the speakers argued "partner with a librarian!" (for research projects, not p0rn) Several of us talked with him after his presentation and said that we'd tried, but they were too far out-of-touch and he replied that his experience was clearly the exception.
Income smoothing has been turned into a (questionably) legal art form by General Electric and its former leader
Jack Welch.
This started long before George 'W' and represents a larger than Enron class failure of auditing and business ethics. The point of accounting is to report the accurate state of affairs of the organization, not some CEO/CFO's wishful thinking.
Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) are created and maintained by the
Financial Accounting Standards Board (which interestingly doesn't come up with a Google search -- at least when I looked for it). Much of the current round of problems can be laid clearly in their lap.
The consensus in the auditing community is that the lesson was not learned with Enron and hence an even larger disaster will have to happen before this increasingly corrupt set of practices, auditors, and corporations is revised.
I'll also note that I am about as pro-business as it is possible to be, but when all of business stands on quicksand because of bogus financials there is the opportunity for just a little shaking causing the whole thing to liquify and slide into the morass.
As luck would have it, Unisys was already scheduled to come talk today. "Our senior management has decided that we'll be an all-Microsoft company."
So they're migrating all their mainframe customers to Win2k running on their very expensive up-to-32-way Wintel 'mainframe' (caugh).
me: So there are no plans for Linux then?
them: No. We don't think it scales and besides Unix is proprietary.
me: www.osdl.org has it on a 16cpu (4x4) NUMA and it appears to scale just fine.
them: We don't know. Nearly everyone we talk to asks us what our Linux plan is and we just tell them "senior management has decided we'll run Windows."
So I finished with the FreeBSD server stuff and they went 'oh yeah, we got some internal mail on that stuff'.
Unisys is just being their normal closed, proprietary self. They make zillions doing this by being kissy-face with governments all over. I hope this round bites them squarely since Windows does not make an enterprise O/S no matter how much wishful thinking is done on Bill's or Unisys's part.
I do a lot of consulting and I'm busy moving my customers out of Ameritech (especially Indiana) because Ameritech is corrupt, uneducated, incoherent slime. Just this week I had an installer just storm off a job site cursing 'I don't need this f**king shit' with the customer down and the job marked 'complete'. He was there to repair the damage done by the previous Ameritech installer. It took four installers, four days to put in two simple POTS lines in a vaguely complex wiring closet of Ameritech's design.
I personally have caused Indiana to lose several million dollars in tax revenue. Ameritech is one of the major reasons that people whine about the 'Indiana brain drain' where Indiana trained graduates move somewhere else to get high-paying real jobs. Can't get reasonably priced data services? Why locate in Indiana? -- simple! don't!
Move somewhere else. Get away from Ameritech since there is near zero hope that any governmental body is going to have any opportunity to get these bozos broken up or otherwise reformed. When all that is left is backwards, tiny companies that don't depend on communications then Ameritech served states might figure out it is an incompetent telecommunications company that is the problem. In the mean time, the number and length of outages is going to constantly go up and up because there is no one left inside the organization that has a clue how the system works.
But this argument works against ALL servers and 'big iron' makers not just Sun.
That is the poster's point exactly. ALL big iron people will be irrelevant if Itanium based systems make it deep into the volume curve and hence are very inexpensive. I don't see how Sun will be able to keep up with the economies that Intel brings to the party. Obviously Compaq and HP thought similarly and that's why they're out of the CPU business.
So let's say that that happens... where will the marketplace go then?
Slashdot Mirror
Hilton Abuja
From their site:
Creditcard confirmation required
-- Multics
In this turn of events, all that will win are the suits.
-- Multics
There is enough Glonass still functioning that given a little luck one can still get a time sync and position about 50% of the time.
-- Multics
And yes... google is my friend.
-- Multics
http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2003/03012 3b.html
and
http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2002/02103 1a.html
----
HP is slowly rotting. We'll clearly see huge layoffs soon. Examples:
In a major bid for PCs recently (1000+ systems) they were 150+% of the lowest bid. So much for what one sales executive said in the press, "we will loose no bids because of price."
Shipping of I2 products started amazingly late.
The ever-diminishing quality of Scanjets. "Oh you mean that you used it a couple of hours a day? They aren't designed for that!", said the help desk. Funny, the old ones were. I'd like those designs updated and then leave the hell alone. And yes, sell parts for the damn things so when the bulb dies we just replace the bulb, not the whole scanner.
Even their own folks admit that the Laserjet 9000 mechanics are awful.
It all adds up to HP management not sticking to their core business, but instead messing around with mergers and other things they don't understand.
I have been hopeing that someone would purchase the corpse of HP calculators and return to the innovation that made them great. They'll have to restart the IR printers and the IO cards. They'll also have to reassemble the team that made the designs things one took months to grow into. Making HP calculators a success would be a delightful proof of concept that Carlie is a by the numbers, not by the ideas manager. HP was made by ideas, not numbers.
Soon Dell+Lexmark will have gotten the costs down, the quality up and the delivered cost per page halved. Then HP will not be able to live off the cash cow that printing and imaging currently is. Then there will be trouble in the core of the business that no amount of MBA money manipulation will be able to fix. Ideas still count in high tech, a thought lost on the HP front office.
Finally, I was very bumbed that Agilent didn't get to keep the HP name. The HP way is still alive over there. HP should have lost the right to have the name of two wonderful engineers in their name when they spun Agilent off. Talk about dumping the date that brought you to the dance!
HP will survive; they have too many bright people and a good portfolio of Intellectual Property. The path to survival is going to get really really ugly and there is little now that can be done to prevent that.
-- Multics
Given the previous mis-reporting (and I was around in the early 70s) I take issue with any one person or organization getting 'credit' for personal computing. It was time, in the industry, to do this. Already in tbe back of Scienctific American were half a dozen companies advertisting mini-computers that were targeted to a single researcher. I was on PDP 8s and soon thereafter PDP 11s which were mostly being used to support single people.
Allen Kay shold get credit for bringing to prominance the windowing environments that most of us now use.
-- Multics
Do we need a WiFi NetRadio adding to the constant din of packets in the limited bandwidth available?
-- Multics
1) the /. creaters are by-in-large the /. people that control the posting of stories
2) Most stories contain at least one URL
3) URL's, by in large, are unique
Then;
Would it be so hard to modify the actual posting code to check that the URL hadn't already been part of a story header within say the last 60 days?
Such a check would help both /. and all others that run / code.
Just a thought!
-- Multics
Creeps like the Pollards are much more of a risk to encryption systems than this problem.
As to the parinoid amongst you, the shuttle's have used some military com technology since nearly their inception. The military paid part of the initial development and that was one of the consessions that NASA made to keep them happy. Do remember that there was a plan, up till Challenger, to launch from the CA coast for missions that were all military.
-- Multics
-- Multics
I urge all of you to send material from their site, but be sure to edit to make their words your own. Be sure to suggest measures to help with the unsolicited email industry which has to be worth at least $1,000,000,000,000 a year to the economy.
-- Multics
-- Multics
Hiller had one killer problem... flight duration (90 SECONDS).
SoloTrek was claiming 1.5-2hr flight durations. which would have made their system viable for all sorts of odd things from military to power line inspection and repair. Oh and their fuel wasn't ultra vile like Hiller's was.
Try building one of these things, then bitch... the control theory alone is a major problem.
-- Multics
Perhaps google could offer a new service that only indexes sites that are bobby & w3 safe? that would help us all enforce good behavior on the WWW.
In all seriousness, these mouse-over events are a major pain in the ass for consumers that have accessibility problems. I'll be glad to route their advertisement servers to null. Anyone got a robust set of names?
-- Multics
"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men".
From: Phrase Finder.
-- Multics
Indiana tried this 105 years ago... That will put Panama about the right technological place in time.
-- Multics
-- Multics
At least they're smart enough to implement it coherently unlike a dozen or so who've tried previously. It sounds like this product is about 70% of what a Dynabook is supposed to be.
-- Multics
Current plans are for embedded Power 4 CPUs at around 1GHz. (Think grown up G4s)
-- Multics
Second, the AIX roadmap goes out to at least 2007 (five year planning window). So don't be throwing away your SMIT knowledge quite yet. I'd be very surprised if there wasn't significant AIX work being done as far out as 2010.
IBM has at least us$20B in AIX and as a result it is very mature. They're putting nearly us$1B a year into Linux (JFS being just one wonderful thing ported). It will still be a while before they can bet the company on Linux. Do also keep in mind that AIX has at least a 15 year head start on Linux.
-- Multics
It is clear that just as computer geeks naturally select themselves as computer people, librarians do the same. They like books, research, and then tend to be very rigid in their outlook on work and life.
In addition to their natural tendancies, the American Library Association has not helped matters. It is controlled by a bunch of introspective, vision-less, and rigid nay-sayers. Go to the ALA web site and see what kinds of literature they are currently offering! See anything about how to design cataloging systems? See much about information management? nope. Then, beyond that, ALA's been very successful locking up big chunks of their corner of the world with locking up job descriptions to ALA accreditation which requires a visionless curriculum.
I think it is hopeless until most current library managers a retired and a new crop that is not afraid of innovation and change come to the fore front.
So do I wish Librarians would come to the information party in a contemporary way? Absolutely! Alas I have very little hope that it will happen anytime in the near future.
-- Multics
P.S. at a recent conference I attended, one of the speakers argued "partner with a librarian!" (for research projects, not p0rn) Several of us talked with him after his presentation and said that we'd tried, but they were too far out-of-touch and he replied that his experience was clearly the exception.
This started long before George 'W' and represents a larger than Enron class failure of auditing and business ethics. The point of accounting is to report the accurate state of affairs of the organization, not some CEO/CFO's wishful thinking.
Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) are created and maintained by the Financial Accounting Standards Board (which interestingly doesn't come up with a Google search -- at least when I looked for it). Much of the current round of problems can be laid clearly in their lap.
The consensus in the auditing community is that the lesson was not learned with Enron and hence an even larger disaster will have to happen before this increasingly corrupt set of practices, auditors, and corporations is revised.
I'll also note that I am about as pro-business as it is possible to be, but when all of business stands on quicksand because of bogus financials there is the opportunity for just a little shaking causing the whole thing to liquify and slide into the morass.
-- Multics
So they're migrating all their mainframe customers to Win2k running on their very expensive up-to-32-way Wintel 'mainframe' (caugh).
me: So there are no plans for Linux then?
them: No. We don't think it scales and besides Unix is proprietary.
me: www.osdl.org has it on a 16cpu (4x4) NUMA and it appears to scale just fine.
them: We don't know. Nearly everyone we talk to asks us what our Linux plan is and we just tell them "senior management has decided we'll run Windows."
So I finished with the FreeBSD server stuff and they went 'oh yeah, we got some internal mail on that stuff'.
Unisys is just being their normal closed, proprietary self. They make zillions doing this by being kissy-face with governments all over. I hope this round bites them squarely since Windows does not make an enterprise O/S no matter how much wishful thinking is done on Bill's or Unisys's part.
-- Multics
I personally have caused Indiana to lose several million dollars in tax revenue. Ameritech is one of the major reasons that people whine about the 'Indiana brain drain' where Indiana trained graduates move somewhere else to get high-paying real jobs. Can't get reasonably priced data services? Why locate in Indiana? -- simple! don't!
Move somewhere else. Get away from Ameritech since there is near zero hope that any governmental body is going to have any opportunity to get these bozos broken up or otherwise reformed. When all that is left is backwards, tiny companies that don't depend on communications then Ameritech served states might figure out it is an incompetent telecommunications company that is the problem. In the mean time, the number and length of outages is going to constantly go up and up because there is no one left inside the organization that has a clue how the system works.
-- Multics
That is the poster's point exactly. ALL big iron people will be irrelevant if Itanium based systems make it deep into the volume curve and hence are very inexpensive. I don't see how Sun will be able to keep up with the economies that Intel brings to the party. Obviously Compaq and HP thought similarly and that's why they're out of the CPU business.
So let's say that that happens... where will the marketplace go then?
-- Multics