But that unholy trinity sued, and then sponsored a law to prevent it, saying PUDs may not compete for telecommunication services. The only counties that got grandfathered in have gigabit fiber to the premises, for cheap. Two of the least dense counties in the state, and the PUDs are making so much money at it they have to lower power rates to compensate. But somehow those three don't see a profit in it in the most densely populated CITIES, let alone counties.
Somebody needs to explain to Google's wizards that Mountain View, CA is nice, but Cow Country isn't as close to Oakland. And for about the price you can get for your suburb five-bedroom conversion on 1/6 acre in California you can get almost 4.5 SQUARE MILES of ranch property with over a mile of major river frontage, countless trout and salmon ponds and streams and so on. And if you've got gigabit internet and HD telepresence software, who needs to go in to the office anyway?
I did download and read the paper as you suggested. They seem to be quite thorough. It's a good paper. As my opinion mattered I don't disagree with it, and it does lay out some specific conditions likely to have occurred where an impactor might have landed earthly life in still-viable condition on Mars and other planets. I suppose I'm going to have to read the referenced paper on the 30ka. I'm not sold on the idea that the "nonviability" of the organism is the end of the story here. Even a thoroughly dead ball of organic material dumped in the ocean might jump-start the process.
OK, I'll give some theories. None of these are mine:
1a. (abiogenesis) Life arose on Earth before (400My) or during (300My) the Late Heavy Bombardment and survived because not all of the crust was molten at any given time. The simultaneous re-melting of the entire surface is still debated, right? As bacteria are known to exist miles beneath the Earth's surface and huge impactors move stuff around, this is fairly plausible.
1b. (abiogenesis) Life arose on Earth before (400My) or during (300My) the Late Heavy Bombardment and survived because large rocks knocked large chunks of the Earth off but they landed back to seed life again within 30,000 years. This is fairly plausible also, but seems less likely than 1a. When we start mining some Earth Trojan asteroids perhaps we'll find evidence one way or another.
1c. (abiogenesis) Life arose on Earth within about 300My of the end of the LHB. This one seems less likely to me than either of the above, though I confess I have no data.
2a. (abiogenesis/panspermia) Some time in the span of 7 billion years span between the sun's precursor Population II star's explosion life arose in the detritus, perhaps in a natural nuclear fission reactor in an Earth sized agglommeration of debris, or in a small body orbiting a brown dwarf. The solar system's mass being slowed enough by the shockwave from another supernova, infall occurs and as chaos becomes order the genesis rock gets powdered and sprinkled all over the entire solar system, the brown dwarf swallowed in the infall to become the sun. Although unviable as lifeforms some essential complex compounds jump-start life on Earth.
2b. (panspermia) The above condition occurs, but the building blocks for life are in the shockwave rather than native.
2c. (panspermia) Somewhere in the vast cooling mass of the expanding supernova shockwave from a Population II star (up to 130 solar masses) the chemical reaction that creates amino acids occurs with a certain very low frequency so some very small fraction of interstellar dust is littered with the stuff. Cosmic rays are harsh, but enough samples survive to fall on the right environment and interact. Perhaps, being sticky, the molecules tend to preferentially attract water and become comets.
3. (Universal panspermia) One of the preceding three option occurs with such frequency in the Universe that every time a planet forms with the right (very wide) surface conditions, life takes root with essential materials fairly immediately. I like this one because it means that every place life could ever have been, we'll find evidence that it was.
4. (deliberate panspermia) Some joker on a minor planet like Ceres builds a railgun and starts deliberately shipping off particularly hardy life to nearby stars in the hope that if his race should find a way to get there, his spores would have made life more habitable when they arrive - or at least that life would have some hope of surviving the death of his sun.
5. Something else.
Interesting theories all, and an amusing way to spend a cloudy afternoon pondering abiogenesis as the waves roll in. With more experiments like Hayabusa perhaps we'll know one day for sure. Maybe even in my lifetime. That would be nice.
It did happen. It happens every year. Each year perfectly ordinary chemicals in saline solution create a precursor to life. Unfortunately as yet they all suffer from the same fatal flaw: they're delicious.
I gave up reading it online six years ago when it became obvious the anti-Linux astroturfers in the comment threads were being deliberately recruited to be article authors and editors. It became the "Linux-suxxors Journal."
On a $400 PC at 5 percent HP makes $20. At 2 percent Lenovo makes $8. That's net of everything - services, warranty uplift, accessories, co-marketing subsidies from software and component partners, affiliate fees for installing crudware. Everything.
Agility has nothing to do with it. Windows 8 is coming. Apple is disrupting. Android is taking the world by storm. There's nothing HP can do about those things. There is no path to victory here. None at all.
24. The general who advances without coveting fame and retreats without fearing disgrace,
whose only thought is to protect his country and do good service for his sovereign, is the jewel of the kingdom.
Commoditization of the hardware and razor thing margins leads to a rather severe avoidance of risk. Risk-taking is what drives innovation. That's why PC OEMs haven't given us anything amazing and revolutionary for fifteen years. They can't afford the risk. That's also why they dare not turn from Windows to new software platforms. To do so would be to decline Microsoft's co-marketing dollars which are not just all of their profits but offset a lot of their negative profits as well. This would drive the price of all of their products up, not just the innovative ones, guarantee failure in the marketplace.
Now with the shift to mobile they get the risk whether they choose to avoid it or not. It had to happen eventually. The increased risks of a dynamic market combined with razor thin margins make for a guaranteed money loser. Deprived of the freedom to innovate and build brand premium they have no choice but to fold their hand.
HP has just run the numbers and figured out what IBM did in 2005: the only way to win is not to play this game. There are other games to play that offer at least the hope of a good win someday.
Unfortunately they've also just announced that they're ready to spin off a major product line with no buyer in view, no plan. This will almost certainly result in rapid sales decline until people see what the outcome will be. This is the Elop maneuver.
They'll buy the number 3 slot at 3% market share, with a net loss of $4 billion a year - because they dare not give up. Until they just don't have that kind of money to burn any more. Which will be sooner than you would believe possible.
Agree about RIM. I don't see them making a go of it.
How good the Windows Phone thing might be is irrelevant. Microsoft cannot force retail vendors to push the product on an unwilling public, and that's the end of that story. It is technologically impossible for Microsoft to make the thing wonderful enough to make it an aspirational product that the public demands from their retailer.
From the audio of the conference call it's not on the table at all. Reasonably good margins in servers, links to great margin services revenue and vertically integrated "converged" systems.
The Transformer is nice and well worth the $400. But you were specific at under $300, capacitive screen and dual core CPU so that would be the Viewsonic gTablet: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004EPV7TK at $270. I have one of each and they are very nice. I was going to load cyanogen on the gTablet but my wife likes it as it is with Android 2.2. Maybe upgrade it later.
Some are saying that the Google buy of Motorola Mobility may have been a big factor in the decision to kill WebOS hardware. They can't afford to keep up with that level of investment against the iOS and Android ecosystems' dynamic synergy. Too hard for a third player to bootstrap here. I hope RIM is watching this. It's too late for Nokia to take this turn.
You have to work really hard for that PC dollar. In desktop PCs Microsoft makes several times the profit dollars per unit than HP or Lenovo does. Lenovo's crowing about "huge" $100M profits on $5B sales right now- about 2 percent. That's a lot of work and risk for $100M profit to be a good thing. You could blow $100M just by, say, building an initial run of half a million tablets that don't sell.
HP also reported that it plans to announce that its board of directors has authorized the exploration of strategic alternatives for its Personal Systems Group (PSG). HP will consider a broad range of options that may include, among others, a full or partial separation of PSG from HP through a spin-off or other transaction.
In 1999 linux platforms for personal use weren't moving 650,000 units a day. They are now, taking nearly half of the global smartphone market share of sales. ARM is in the same boat, putting a PC in every pocket at the fore of the mobile revolution, bringing all-day tablets to the masses and driving the only growth in the IT industry at unheard-of rates. You point and stare, calling out "You're doing it wrong!" as the platform is taking over the world.
Don't you think that's silly? Surely there's some other platform that needs some helpful guidance more than ARM.
ARM chips sell over 10x IA chip volumes. More volume supports more choices. Linux runs on a good fraction and I'm writing this on one. It appears that the cost to migrate to a new chip is so low that a gang of volunteers can keep up with hundreds of phone and tablet models and deliver rapid platform updates quite swiftly. I don't see a problem.
This is the "beware fragmentation" pitch we laughed at in distros, in Linux apps, in Android phones and tablets. This is absurd and deserves ridicule. Fragmentation is choice. Do we need to cringe in peril when we discover that our corner convenience store's water market is so fragmented that it offers 17 choices in simple, unflavored uncolored water? No. We should ask why the water often costs more than Gasoline, but that is a separate issue.
So I wish I could agree. But ARM is following the same diversity explosion and darwinian selection as FOSS, and for the same reasons. Out of this chaos comes the wonderful bounty of choices in our modern digital buffet. PCs have become stagnant. If you want one they are still available, but don't really do anything more than they did 15 years ago.
Slashdot Mirror
But that unholy trinity sued, and then sponsored a law to prevent it, saying PUDs may not compete for telecommunication services. The only counties that got grandfathered in have gigabit fiber to the premises, for cheap. Two of the least dense counties in the state, and the PUDs are making so much money at it they have to lower power rates to compensate. But somehow those three don't see a profit in it in the most densely populated CITIES, let alone counties.
Somebody needs to explain to Google's wizards that Mountain View, CA is nice, but Cow Country isn't as close to Oakland. And for about the price you can get for your suburb five-bedroom conversion on 1/6 acre in California you can get almost 4.5 SQUARE MILES of ranch property with over a mile of major river frontage, countless trout and salmon ponds and streams and so on. And if you've got gigabit internet and HD telepresence software, who needs to go in to the office anyway?
Give us the Fiber Google, and the world is yours.
Buy the rumor. Sell the news.
That was supposed to read "as if my opinion mattered" - as in, "I am not a rocket scientist."
I did download and read the paper as you suggested. They seem to be quite thorough. It's a good paper. As my opinion mattered I don't disagree with it, and it does lay out some specific conditions likely to have occurred where an impactor might have landed earthly life in still-viable condition on Mars and other planets. I suppose I'm going to have to read the referenced paper on the 30ka. I'm not sold on the idea that the "nonviability" of the organism is the end of the story here. Even a thoroughly dead ball of organic material dumped in the ocean might jump-start the process.
OK, I'll give some theories. None of these are mine:
1a. (abiogenesis) Life arose on Earth before (400My) or during (300My) the Late Heavy Bombardment and survived because not all of the crust was molten at any given time. The simultaneous re-melting of the entire surface is still debated, right? As bacteria are known to exist miles beneath the Earth's surface and huge impactors move stuff around, this is fairly plausible.
1b. (abiogenesis) Life arose on Earth before (400My) or during (300My) the Late Heavy Bombardment and survived because large rocks knocked large chunks of the Earth off but they landed back to seed life again within 30,000 years. This is fairly plausible also, but seems less likely than 1a. When we start mining some Earth Trojan asteroids perhaps we'll find evidence one way or another.
1c. (abiogenesis) Life arose on Earth within about 300My of the end of the LHB. This one seems less likely to me than either of the above, though I confess I have no data.
2a. (abiogenesis/panspermia) Some time in the span of 7 billion years span between the sun's precursor Population II star's explosion life arose in the detritus, perhaps in a natural nuclear fission reactor in an Earth sized agglommeration of debris, or in a small body orbiting a brown dwarf. The solar system's mass being slowed enough by the shockwave from another supernova, infall occurs and as chaos becomes order the genesis rock gets powdered and sprinkled all over the entire solar system, the brown dwarf swallowed in the infall to become the sun. Although unviable as lifeforms some essential complex compounds jump-start life on Earth.
2b. (panspermia) The above condition occurs, but the building blocks for life are in the shockwave rather than native.
2c. (panspermia) Somewhere in the vast cooling mass of the expanding supernova shockwave from a Population II star (up to 130 solar masses) the chemical reaction that creates amino acids occurs with a certain very low frequency so some very small fraction of interstellar dust is littered with the stuff. Cosmic rays are harsh, but enough samples survive to fall on the right environment and interact. Perhaps, being sticky, the molecules tend to preferentially attract water and become comets.
3. (Universal panspermia) One of the preceding three option occurs with such frequency in the Universe that every time a planet forms with the right (very wide) surface conditions, life takes root with essential materials fairly immediately. I like this one because it means that every place life could ever have been, we'll find evidence that it was.
4. (deliberate panspermia) Some joker on a minor planet like Ceres builds a railgun and starts deliberately shipping off particularly hardy life to nearby stars in the hope that if his race should find a way to get there, his spores would have made life more habitable when they arrive - or at least that life would have some hope of surviving the death of his sun.
5. Something else.
Interesting theories all, and an amusing way to spend a cloudy afternoon pondering abiogenesis as the waves roll in. With more experiments like Hayabusa perhaps we'll know one day for sure. Maybe even in my lifetime. That would be nice.
It did happen. It happens every year. Each year perfectly ordinary chemicals in saline solution create a precursor to life. Unfortunately as yet they all suffer from the same fatal flaw: they're delicious.
The latest evidence has fossil life appearing on Earth so soon after the LHB that it is implausible it evolved here.
I gave up reading it online six years ago when it became obvious the anti-Linux astroturfers in the comment threads were being deliberately recruited to be article authors and editors. It became the "Linux-suxxors Journal."
Did they ever turn that around?
Linux is written primarily in C. The reason for this is that C was designed from the very beginning to be ported to new technologies.
On a $400 PC at 5 percent HP makes $20. At 2 percent Lenovo makes $8. That's net of everything - services, warranty uplift, accessories, co-marketing subsidies from software and component partners, affiliate fees for installing crudware. Everything.
Agility has nothing to do with it. Windows 8 is coming. Apple is disrupting. Android is taking the world by storm. There's nothing HP can do about those things. There is no path to victory here. None at all.
24. The general who advances without coveting fame and retreats without fearing disgrace, whose only thought is to protect his country and do good service for his sovereign, is the jewel of the kingdom.
- Sun Tzu
"Where will I be able to buy an HP TouchPad?" Word of the day for three hundred, Alex.
Commoditization of the hardware and razor thing margins leads to a rather severe avoidance of risk. Risk-taking is what drives innovation. That's why PC OEMs haven't given us anything amazing and revolutionary for fifteen years. They can't afford the risk. That's also why they dare not turn from Windows to new software platforms. To do so would be to decline Microsoft's co-marketing dollars which are not just all of their profits but offset a lot of their negative profits as well. This would drive the price of all of their products up, not just the innovative ones, guarantee failure in the marketplace.
Now with the shift to mobile they get the risk whether they choose to avoid it or not. It had to happen eventually. The increased risks of a dynamic market combined with razor thin margins make for a guaranteed money loser. Deprived of the freedom to innovate and build brand premium they have no choice but to fold their hand.
HP has just run the numbers and figured out what IBM did in 2005: the only way to win is not to play this game. There are other games to play that offer at least the hope of a good win someday.
Unfortunately they've also just announced that they're ready to spin off a major product line with no buyer in view, no plan. This will almost certainly result in rapid sales decline until people see what the outcome will be. This is the Elop maneuver.
They'll buy the number 3 slot at 3% market share, with a net loss of $4 billion a year - because they dare not give up. Until they just don't have that kind of money to burn any more. Which will be sooner than you would believe possible.
Agree about RIM. I don't see them making a go of it.
How good the Windows Phone thing might be is irrelevant. Microsoft cannot force retail vendors to push the product on an unwilling public, and that's the end of that story. It is technologically impossible for Microsoft to make the thing wonderful enough to make it an aspirational product that the public demands from their retailer.
From the audio of the conference call it's not on the table at all. Reasonably good margins in servers, links to great margin services revenue and vertically integrated "converged" systems.
The Transformer is nice and well worth the $400. But you were specific at under $300, capacitive screen and dual core CPU so that would be the Viewsonic gTablet: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004EPV7TK at $270. I have one of each and they are very nice. I was going to load cyanogen on the gTablet but my wife likes it as it is with Android 2.2. Maybe upgrade it later.
Some are saying that the Google buy of Motorola Mobility may have been a big factor in the decision to kill WebOS hardware. They can't afford to keep up with that level of investment against the iOS and Android ecosystems' dynamic synergy. Too hard for a third player to bootstrap here. I hope RIM is watching this. It's too late for Nokia to take this turn.
This is live now.
You have to work really hard for that PC dollar. In desktop PCs Microsoft makes several times the profit dollars per unit than HP or Lenovo does. Lenovo's crowing about "huge" $100M profits on $5B sales right now- about 2 percent. That's a lot of work and risk for $100M profit to be a good thing. You could blow $100M just by, say, building an initial run of half a million tablets that don't sell.
Coulda woulda shoulda. Too late now.
Same reason IBM did it. Lenovo is crowing now about a huge bump in profits - something like $100M on $5B, or 2 percent.
HP also reported that it plans to announce that its board of directors has authorized the exploration of strategic alternatives for its Personal Systems Group (PSG). HP will consider a broad range of options that may include, among others, a full or partial separation of PSG from HP through a spin-off or other transaction.
http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20110818006301/en/HP-Confirms-Discussions-Autonomy-Corporation-plc-Business
www.hp.com/investor/2011q3webcast
That should sell in the dozens.
In 1999 linux platforms for personal use weren't moving 650,000 units a day. They are now, taking nearly half of the global smartphone market share of sales. ARM is in the same boat, putting a PC in every pocket at the fore of the mobile revolution, bringing all-day tablets to the masses and driving the only growth in the IT industry at unheard-of rates. You point and stare, calling out "You're doing it wrong!" as the platform is taking over the world.
Don't you think that's silly? Surely there's some other platform that needs some helpful guidance more than ARM.
ARM chips sell over 10x IA chip volumes. More volume supports more choices. Linux runs on a good fraction and I'm writing this on one. It appears that the cost to migrate to a new chip is so low that a gang of volunteers can keep up with hundreds of phone and tablet models and deliver rapid platform updates quite swiftly. I don't see a problem.
This is the "beware fragmentation" pitch we laughed at in distros, in Linux apps, in Android phones and tablets. This is absurd and deserves ridicule. Fragmentation is choice. Do we need to cringe in peril when we discover that our corner convenience store's water market is so fragmented that it offers 17 choices in simple, unflavored uncolored water? No. We should ask why the water often costs more than Gasoline, but that is a separate issue.
So I wish I could agree. But ARM is following the same diversity explosion and darwinian selection as FOSS, and for the same reasons. Out of this chaos comes the wonderful bounty of choices in our modern digital buffet. PCs have become stagnant. If you want one they are still available, but don't really do anything more than they did 15 years ago.