HP just sacked all of the WebOS hardware people. They can't sell that expertise. That was a really dumb decision. If they wanted to get rid of WebOS, they should have kept them onboard and sold the hardware and software division together (or fired the hardware guys after they sold the software team if no one wanted them). If they really wanted to be like IBM though, they should have kept both and sold their services to other companies. When Amazon wants a new Kindle and B&N wants a new Nook, HP should be approaching them with offers to design the whole thing, hardware and software.
That strategy worked well for SGI. No, wait, no it didn't...
Oracle has a shrinking market for their database. If you need a big database, you go with Oracle, but the definition of big keeps moving. A payroll database that was a few tens of MBs used to be big. Now we're talking (at least) tens of GBs. Things like Postgresql are as good as Oracle at the low end, and the low end has gone from being 10% of the market to being 90%, and it keeps growing upwards, just as commodity desktop GPUs gradually ate the graphical workstation market.
The T4 is a beautiful chip, but a decent T4 system costs $90K. It may be better than any Intel system for database / web server workloads, but at that price it has to be at least ten times better, and it isn't.
Sounds like a good reason to avoid FedEx. In my case, I was sending signed copies of my latest book back to my publisher, but imagine if it had been a repair collection from a customer. Their experience with FedEx would probably put them off doing business with you ever again...
Describing Android as a F/OSS project is a bit of a stretch. It's a proprietary system that Google bought, half-heartedly opened, and then mostly closed again. One proprietary software company creating a crappy clone of another proprietary software company's product. Not exactly uncommon...
No such thing. DisplayPort and Mini DisplayPort are both open standards
-Apple Thunderbolt
I think you mean Intel Thunderbolt.
New upcoming proprietory headphone connector
You can probably have this one, although my understanding is that normal headphones will go in the slot, they'll just stick out sideways slightly.
-30pin connector for iDevices opposed to mini-usb
Not really comparable, unless you're talking about some magic version of mini-USB that can carry RS-232, S-Video, 40W power, and FireWire signals as well as USB. This is likely to be replaced by Thunderbolt when the controllers get cheaper.
Proprietory CD format
Big WTF there. Apple uses ISO9660, just like everyone else.
Firewire (who uses that except when needed to interface with Apple?)
Pretty much anyone doing high-end AV work. Most DV cameras were FireWire until USB2 became vaguely competent, and even now the decent ones are FireWire. The company thinking differently here was Sony, which decided to ship crippled IEE1394 connectors under the i.Link brand, using 4 pins instead of 6 and so not providing power.
-Apple Desktop Bus
-Localtalk
-ADC
Now we're going so far back in time that it's irrelevant. Check the number of proprietary connectors on any computer from this era.
Mini-DVI
You can have that one. Mini-DVI was a silly idea from the start.
When you say *NIX, you mean GNU/Linux. Flash on OS X has been fine (although a massive resource hog because Adobe insists on doing things the silly way, like implementing their own compositing stuff in software when OS X has simple APIs for doing it in hardware) and Adobe does not provide Flash on any *NIX platforms except Linux and OS X. The glibc bug was caused by Drepper being an idiot, but everyone knows Drepper is an idiot and so using his code is something sane people avoid.
And, really, you mean x86/Linux. Interestingly, Flash runs pretty well on my TouchPad (ARM/Linux). Watching a 45 minute TV show on iPlayer used about 11% of the battery. I just tried playing Kingdom Rush, and it was slightly slow but worked okay and playing it for 10 minutes used less than 1% of my battery.
Have you ever even tried walking? You don't push through resistance on the ground. You place your feed above it and then your weight pushes through the resistance. The energy you put in is in lifting your foot and transferring your weight to it. You push downwards into the foot that you are stepping off, but that one will already be on the solid ground with the switch depressed.
With that small amount of flexing, it's not the energy stored in the muscles and tendons, it's the energy that's dissipated by grinding the cartilage in your joints against your bones. It's equivalent to walking in air-sole trainers, not walking in sand...
No it isn't. Every time you step, you lift your foot (more than 5mm!), move it, and then place it down. Your weight is transferred to the new tile. If anything, this is going to be better to walk over than a hard floor, because it reduces the amount of stress on your knees from the impacts on the ground. You're not moving another 5mm, you're just encountering resistance 5mm before your foot hits the real ground.
In much of the rest of the world, there is also the fact that mobile phones charge the same for outgoing calls (or count them from included minutes) irrespective of whether the recipient is a landline or a mobile, while landlines charge more for calls to mobiles. Calling a mobile from a mobile costs about the same as calling it from a landline, while calling a landline from a mobile costs as much as calling a mobile from a mobile. Only landline to landline calls are cheaper, so the advantage of a landline over a mobile drops the more people you know with mobiles. In the USA, receiving calls on your landline is free, so you want to keep it and you want to encourage people to call it, rather than your mobile.
In the UK, there is also the issue that line rental for landlines is expensive. You pay about £10/month, plus calls. A £10/month mobile contract will get you about 300 minutes included. I generally spend about £2-3/month on my pre-pay mobile. If I had a landline, I'd be paying over three times as much before I made any calls. If I made a lot of calls, then I'd get a plan with a lot of inclusive minutes, and even then a mobile would be a similar price or cheaper than a landline.
As a result, a lot of people in their 20s and 30s don't have landlines at all.
I had a lot of fun when my bank tried to call me to sell me things. Every time they called, they'd ask me to confirm who I was by providing them with some information that they'd have on file. I pointed out that I was the recipient of the call and my identity was therefore not in question, while they were calling from a withheld number, so they first had to prove that they really were representatives of my bank. Of course, I refused to accept any of the identification mechanisms that they suggested. Eventually they marked me as a time waster in their system and stopped calling.
I used to get calls from someone claiming to work for Orange and wanting to talk to me about upgrading my service. Although my mobile phone number was originally allocated to Orange, I haven't been one of their customers for almost a decade, and someone who actually worked there would have known that. Demanding their business address, their full name, and telling them that I would be prosecuting for fraud got them to hang up quickly and never call back.
That doesn't work. FedEx decided to tell a debt collector to chase me for non-payment of a bill. There were two problems with this:
The bill was supposed to be paid by the recipient, since they were the ones that contacted FedEx and who arranged the collection - I had no contract with FedEx of any kind.
The recipient was a FedEx corporate customer, who had paid the bill on time.
Unfortunately, because they paid FedEx USA and FedEx UK made the collection, the payment got lost in their internal invoicing system. After I first contacted FedEx to tell them it was their incompetence, they issued me with a credit note that could be used to pay. Unfortunately, they somehow placed the collection in their system twice, so only paying it off once didn't fix it.
I eventually got it fixed after FedEx had referred it to a legal firm that specialised in debt collection, which sent me a letter telling me that they would be taking me to court if I didn't pay the (fictitious) debt, plus a collection fee. I telephoned them and said I would be delighted to meet them in court, as I had an email from FedEx informing me that the debt was an error and I would be requesting that the judge awarded legal fees to me and would countersue for the time that they'd wasted. They got FedEx to fix their system
I still have not received an apology from FedEx, a year later.
There's probably something a lot simpler that will get it fixed: buy the government. Not only is your government for sale - it's actually quite cheap. If you really want to get it fixed, a small amount of money per voter will get enough senators and representatives to vote for your campaign contribution reforms to pass...
HP just fired the hardware design team, so it won't be coming back from them. That said, they're looking to license WebOS, and I wouldn't be surprised if they'd throw in the designs for the TouchPad and Pre 3 to any ODMs wanting to license it, so we may see third-party TouchPads.
Another AOL-style post here. I'm still not sure I see the point of tablets, but the TouchPad is a really nice. HP sent me a free one to work on Objective-C support (clang can now cross-compile for the TouchPad and GNUstep's Foundation implementation runs there, but you still need a WebOS-native GUI).
One thing that really impresses me is the battery life. I watched a 45-minute TV show from iPlayer on the TouchPad. After 45 minutes of streaming Flash video, the device still had 89% of its battery left. So much for Apple's complaints that Flash would drain the battery...
It's also really friendly for developers. The SDK comes with an app called novaterm, which gives you a root shell over the serial cable. You can also use the SDK tools to install OpenSSH (including sftp), so you don't need to use the cable to copy files across.
Oh, and if anyone has one and hasn't already tried this: hold the device in the card view with the speakers at the top and pull the top card right down to the bottom of the screen.
I take it you don't read Slashdot regularly. Apple buys insane quantities of flash for the iPods, iPhones, iPads, and now for laptops as well. They pay, in advance, for the entire production run from a factory for some period of time. The often even pay for some of the build costs of the factory. This gets them huge discounts. I don't know what they're paying now, but when the iPod Nano came out Apple was paying about half as much for flash as everyone else.
Another poster already said security. Most people, when they make phonecalls, expect them to be secure. They aren't, but they're vaguely secure because your call is encrypted (by weak, broken, encryption in most cellphone standards) to the tower and is then kept on a private network (or, in a few cases, a VPN) until it gets to the person you call. The intermediate hops are all in the hands of various telephone companies.
Now, it would make good engineering sense if I could set up my own cell and advertise it. Anyone who gets a strong signal could use it, and I'd then charge their telephone company a small amount of money for each call that was made through it. The person making the call would then have to trust me not to spy on the traffic, and trust my ISP to deliver the packets with low enough latency and jitter for a telephone call. The first part could be solved if mobile phones did end-to-end encryption, but they don't. The second part is a lot harder.
What's your point? Most of them are dead already. Do you think that knowing that you'll only be able to make a few millions from a single song would put people off becoming musicians?
Except that, if they were out of copyright, then anyone would be able to sell the songs. You'd be able to set up a company that could sell the complete studio recordings of The Beatles for $20 - and still make a profit.
A lot of conferences use SlideShare for publishing slides of presentations, rather than put.ppt files that no one on a non-Windows platform can read online. So, if you're interested in recent research, you've probably found yourself on SlideShare a few times. It doesn't really give you anything of value though. ESUG put my talk slides there, but the PDF version has a load of annotations and the version on SlideShare doesn't, so you're just using a Flash applet to do badly what most systems can do well in native code already...
What video? Or are you another person who thinks that HTML5 is the video tag and nothing more? Slideshare is a site for sharing slides. They don't share video, they share pages of formatted text. They have greater layout constraints than HTML traditionally supports, because they want the slides to appear in your browser just as they appeared on the screen.
Re:Mego is dead, Webos is dead ...
on
Intel Drops MeeGo
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· Score: 1
WebOS isn't dead, it's just on life support. HP still wants to use it in printers and other devices, they're just getting out of the phone and tablet markets. They're also trying to license it. I'd love to see HTC or someone license WebOS - HP was kind enough to send me a TouchPad, and it's a really beautifully designed system.
Any ISP, any electronics manufacturer, and any software vendor stands to have their costs increased and potential product lines curtailed by ACTA. A company like Google, for example, stands to make a lot of money from weaker copyright and spends a lot on lobbying.
The asking prices didn't move much, but they went down a little and people became willing to accept offers quite a bit below. 10-20% below the asking price was fairly common, and some went for as little as 40% below.
I've noticed a change. Interest rates plummeted and so did house prices, so it became good sense to buy a house. I'm now paying about a third in interest payments of what I was previously paying in rent (and I'm living somewhere much nicer), and so I can pay off the capital fairly quickly too. Before the recession, house prices were so crazily high that even with the current interest rates I'd have been paying a lot more, and interest rates were also very high.
Slashdot Mirror
HP just sacked all of the WebOS hardware people. They can't sell that expertise. That was a really dumb decision. If they wanted to get rid of WebOS, they should have kept them onboard and sold the hardware and software division together (or fired the hardware guys after they sold the software team if no one wanted them). If they really wanted to be like IBM though, they should have kept both and sold their services to other companies. When Amazon wants a new Kindle and B&N wants a new Nook, HP should be approaching them with offers to design the whole thing, hardware and software.
That strategy worked well for SGI. No, wait, no it didn't...
Oracle has a shrinking market for their database. If you need a big database, you go with Oracle, but the definition of big keeps moving. A payroll database that was a few tens of MBs used to be big. Now we're talking (at least) tens of GBs. Things like Postgresql are as good as Oracle at the low end, and the low end has gone from being 10% of the market to being 90%, and it keeps growing upwards, just as commodity desktop GPUs gradually ate the graphical workstation market.
The T4 is a beautiful chip, but a decent T4 system costs $90K. It may be better than any Intel system for database / web server workloads, but at that price it has to be at least ten times better, and it isn't.
Sounds like a good reason to avoid FedEx. In my case, I was sending signed copies of my latest book back to my publisher, but imagine if it had been a repair collection from a customer. Their experience with FedEx would probably put them off doing business with you ever again...
Describing Android as a F/OSS project is a bit of a stretch. It's a proprietary system that Google bought, half-heartedly opened, and then mostly closed again. One proprietary software company creating a crappy clone of another proprietary software company's product. Not exactly uncommon...
-Apple DisplayPort
No such thing. DisplayPort and Mini DisplayPort are both open standards
-Apple Thunderbolt
I think you mean Intel Thunderbolt.
New upcoming proprietory headphone connector
You can probably have this one, although my understanding is that normal headphones will go in the slot, they'll just stick out sideways slightly.
-30pin connector for iDevices opposed to mini-usb
Not really comparable, unless you're talking about some magic version of mini-USB that can carry RS-232, S-Video, 40W power, and FireWire signals as well as USB. This is likely to be replaced by Thunderbolt when the controllers get cheaper.
Proprietory CD format
Big WTF there. Apple uses ISO9660, just like everyone else.
Firewire (who uses that except when needed to interface with Apple?)
Pretty much anyone doing high-end AV work. Most DV cameras were FireWire until USB2 became vaguely competent, and even now the decent ones are FireWire. The company thinking differently here was Sony, which decided to ship crippled IEE1394 connectors under the i.Link brand, using 4 pins instead of 6 and so not providing power.
-Apple Desktop Bus
-Localtalk
-ADC
Now we're going so far back in time that it's irrelevant. Check the number of proprietary connectors on any computer from this era.
Mini-DVI
You can have that one. Mini-DVI was a silly idea from the start.
When you say *NIX, you mean GNU/Linux. Flash on OS X has been fine (although a massive resource hog because Adobe insists on doing things the silly way, like implementing their own compositing stuff in software when OS X has simple APIs for doing it in hardware) and Adobe does not provide Flash on any *NIX platforms except Linux and OS X. The glibc bug was caused by Drepper being an idiot, but everyone knows Drepper is an idiot and so using his code is something sane people avoid.
And, really, you mean x86/Linux. Interestingly, Flash runs pretty well on my TouchPad (ARM/Linux). Watching a 45 minute TV show on iPlayer used about 11% of the battery. I just tried playing Kingdom Rush, and it was slightly slow but worked okay and playing it for 10 minutes used less than 1% of my battery.
You have to push through that resistance
Have you ever even tried walking? You don't push through resistance on the ground. You place your feed above it and then your weight pushes through the resistance. The energy you put in is in lifting your foot and transferring your weight to it. You push downwards into the foot that you are stepping off, but that one will already be on the solid ground with the switch depressed.
With that small amount of flexing, it's not the energy stored in the muscles and tendons, it's the energy that's dissipated by grinding the cartilage in your joints against your bones. It's equivalent to walking in air-sole trainers, not walking in sand...
No it isn't. Every time you step, you lift your foot (more than 5mm!), move it, and then place it down. Your weight is transferred to the new tile. If anything, this is going to be better to walk over than a hard floor, because it reduces the amount of stress on your knees from the impacts on the ground. You're not moving another 5mm, you're just encountering resistance 5mm before your foot hits the real ground.
In much of the rest of the world, there is also the fact that mobile phones charge the same for outgoing calls (or count them from included minutes) irrespective of whether the recipient is a landline or a mobile, while landlines charge more for calls to mobiles. Calling a mobile from a mobile costs about the same as calling it from a landline, while calling a landline from a mobile costs as much as calling a mobile from a mobile. Only landline to landline calls are cheaper, so the advantage of a landline over a mobile drops the more people you know with mobiles. In the USA, receiving calls on your landline is free, so you want to keep it and you want to encourage people to call it, rather than your mobile.
In the UK, there is also the issue that line rental for landlines is expensive. You pay about £10/month, plus calls. A £10/month mobile contract will get you about 300 minutes included. I generally spend about £2-3/month on my pre-pay mobile. If I had a landline, I'd be paying over three times as much before I made any calls. If I made a lot of calls, then I'd get a plan with a lot of inclusive minutes, and even then a mobile would be a similar price or cheaper than a landline.
As a result, a lot of people in their 20s and 30s don't have landlines at all.
I had a lot of fun when my bank tried to call me to sell me things. Every time they called, they'd ask me to confirm who I was by providing them with some information that they'd have on file. I pointed out that I was the recipient of the call and my identity was therefore not in question, while they were calling from a withheld number, so they first had to prove that they really were representatives of my bank. Of course, I refused to accept any of the identification mechanisms that they suggested. Eventually they marked me as a time waster in their system and stopped calling.
I used to get calls from someone claiming to work for Orange and wanting to talk to me about upgrading my service. Although my mobile phone number was originally allocated to Orange, I haven't been one of their customers for almost a decade, and someone who actually worked there would have known that. Demanding their business address, their full name, and telling them that I would be prosecuting for fraud got them to hang up quickly and never call back.
Unfortunately, because they paid FedEx USA and FedEx UK made the collection, the payment got lost in their internal invoicing system. After I first contacted FedEx to tell them it was their incompetence, they issued me with a credit note that could be used to pay. Unfortunately, they somehow placed the collection in their system twice, so only paying it off once didn't fix it.
I eventually got it fixed after FedEx had referred it to a legal firm that specialised in debt collection, which sent me a letter telling me that they would be taking me to court if I didn't pay the (fictitious) debt, plus a collection fee. I telephoned them and said I would be delighted to meet them in court, as I had an email from FedEx informing me that the debt was an error and I would be requesting that the judge awarded legal fees to me and would countersue for the time that they'd wasted. They got FedEx to fix their system
I still have not received an apology from FedEx, a year later.
There's probably something a lot simpler that will get it fixed: buy the government. Not only is your government for sale - it's actually quite cheap. If you really want to get it fixed, a small amount of money per voter will get enough senators and representatives to vote for your campaign contribution reforms to pass...
HP just fired the hardware design team, so it won't be coming back from them. That said, they're looking to license WebOS, and I wouldn't be surprised if they'd throw in the designs for the TouchPad and Pre 3 to any ODMs wanting to license it, so we may see third-party TouchPads.
Another AOL-style post here. I'm still not sure I see the point of tablets, but the TouchPad is a really nice. HP sent me a free one to work on Objective-C support (clang can now cross-compile for the TouchPad and GNUstep's Foundation implementation runs there, but you still need a WebOS-native GUI).
One thing that really impresses me is the battery life. I watched a 45-minute TV show from iPlayer on the TouchPad. After 45 minutes of streaming Flash video, the device still had 89% of its battery left. So much for Apple's complaints that Flash would drain the battery...
It's also really friendly for developers. The SDK comes with an app called novaterm, which gives you a root shell over the serial cable. You can also use the SDK tools to install OpenSSH (including sftp), so you don't need to use the cable to copy files across.
Oh, and if anyone has one and hasn't already tried this: hold the device in the card view with the speakers at the top and pull the top card right down to the bottom of the screen.
I take it you don't read Slashdot regularly. Apple buys insane quantities of flash for the iPods, iPhones, iPads, and now for laptops as well. They pay, in advance, for the entire production run from a factory for some period of time. The often even pay for some of the build costs of the factory. This gets them huge discounts. I don't know what they're paying now, but when the iPod Nano came out Apple was paying about half as much for flash as everyone else.
Another poster already said security. Most people, when they make phonecalls, expect them to be secure. They aren't, but they're vaguely secure because your call is encrypted (by weak, broken, encryption in most cellphone standards) to the tower and is then kept on a private network (or, in a few cases, a VPN) until it gets to the person you call. The intermediate hops are all in the hands of various telephone companies.
Now, it would make good engineering sense if I could set up my own cell and advertise it. Anyone who gets a strong signal could use it, and I'd then charge their telephone company a small amount of money for each call that was made through it. The person making the call would then have to trust me not to spy on the traffic, and trust my ISP to deliver the packets with low enough latency and jitter for a telephone call. The first part could be solved if mobile phones did end-to-end encryption, but they don't. The second part is a lot harder.
What's your point? Most of them are dead already. Do you think that knowing that you'll only be able to make a few millions from a single song would put people off becoming musicians?
Except that, if they were out of copyright, then anyone would be able to sell the songs. You'd be able to set up a company that could sell the complete studio recordings of The Beatles for $20 - and still make a profit.
A lot of conferences use SlideShare for publishing slides of presentations, rather than put .ppt files that no one on a non-Windows platform can read online. So, if you're interested in recent research, you've probably found yourself on SlideShare a few times. It doesn't really give you anything of value though. ESUG put my talk slides there, but the PDF version has a load of annotations and the version on SlideShare doesn't, so you're just using a Flash applet to do badly what most systems can do well in native code already...
What video? Or are you another person who thinks that HTML5 is the video tag and nothing more? Slideshare is a site for sharing slides. They don't share video, they share pages of formatted text. They have greater layout constraints than HTML traditionally supports, because they want the slides to appear in your browser just as they appeared on the screen.
WebOS isn't dead, it's just on life support. HP still wants to use it in printers and other devices, they're just getting out of the phone and tablet markets. They're also trying to license it. I'd love to see HTC or someone license WebOS - HP was kind enough to send me a TouchPad, and it's a really beautifully designed system.
Any ISP, any electronics manufacturer, and any software vendor stands to have their costs increased and potential product lines curtailed by ACTA. A company like Google, for example, stands to make a lot of money from weaker copyright and spends a lot on lobbying.
The asking prices didn't move much, but they went down a little and people became willing to accept offers quite a bit below. 10-20% below the asking price was fairly common, and some went for as little as 40% below.
I've noticed a change. Interest rates plummeted and so did house prices, so it became good sense to buy a house. I'm now paying about a third in interest payments of what I was previously paying in rent (and I'm living somewhere much nicer), and so I can pay off the capital fairly quickly too. Before the recession, house prices were so crazily high that even with the current interest rates I'd have been paying a lot more, and interest rates were also very high.