Even modern climate scientists agree that the Earth should now be cooling. That's a huge part of their objection - that manmade warming is preventing the onset of a global ice age that is due. We should, according to them, embrace the natural reality of shrinking arable land and expansion of glaciers because that is the natural course according to their calculations. The warming of the Earth must be prevented even if we benefit from it.
And of the billions who would starve to death in that course? They don't figure. Rounding errors. Casualties of math.
It's best to design software for limits that are frankly absurd. Since I coined the phrase "absurd limit theory", let's delve a little bit into it.
A second divided into increments enumerated by fractions of a 64 bit integer is less than the differential travel of differing wavelengths of light over a planck unit of distance. It's a smaller unit of time than matters to our current understanding. 2^64 seconds is more time than the entire history of our Universe from beginning to end even in the most ridiculous theory. Even counting photons and every known subatomic particle, an index of 2^64 is sufficient to enumerate each and every one with a unique ID that represents that one and no other. In each dimension angles discriminated in units of 1/2^64 of a circle are fine enough for any imaginable purpose.
Given that we are close to understanding these elements, 128 bits would probably be a more durable unit. 128 bits should give us a few more years of discrimination before the physical sciences discover even finer units of time, mass and distance. Some even theorize now that 64 bits are the limit: that space, mass and time have a granularity and that finer resolutions are absurd. To that I say...
If software must be designed with limits it should use limits so absurd that no user no matter how hypothetical could be constrained by those limits because the designer does not know how long his application will persist nor how its use will evolve.
It's not the most efficient design that wins. Ultimately it's the most persistent.
I know you were going for funny and got it, so I get the joke and I'm not hateful. You had to dig back a quarter century for that.
For those who don't remember: Once upon a time IBM owned computing. They owned the datacenter and the IBM PC was the only PC. It was not until their dominance in the field was threatened by challengers that the phrase "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" became common. It's an '80's reference. It was the end of IBM's dominance in the datacenter. Once the salespeople had to say that the game was over.
Incidentally, the IBM PC was an accidental rogue engineering program that got out of control and managed to release product before Corporate understood what was happening. By the time the suits understood what was going on it was all over. There's a lesson there.
If the salesman has to resort to telling you that you won't get fired for buying his product, then he lied. You boss pays you to think about what's best for your organization, not to avoid unemployment.
Barbie, you've got some good insight and usually I agree with you. But not today.
I'm getting old. I really like using RDP and Citrix on my iPod Touch. Really, I do. And I'd like to read books and watch movies on it too. But the screen is too small for my elderly eyes even with the best glasses I can get. I need something... bigger. Bigger pockets I can get. Good suits will tailor any pocket you want, or in informal environments you can go with cargo pockets or a Safari vest. I've seen iPad pocket designed clothing already, so it's out there if you look. Better eyes are currently not available at retail. The phone form factor is not big enough to share.
The tablet market is most definitely not going to nosedive. It has reached escape velocity. Apple has sold 1.3 million iPads. That would be a large multiplier of all the other tablet solutions, ever - and that's millions of people who have barely started showing off their neat gear to other people who are going to buy them. We haven't had time yet for a commercial purchase order to clear, so there have been no enterprise deployments yet and there definitely will be. IT geeks love this thing because it's optimal for always-on acess to their servers. They can travel now. Sales pros? They'll fall in love with it too because all the docs, stats and vendor collateral fit on the local storage so if there are questions at the table they don't have to waffle - they can provide proof from the vendor, case studies and slideshows. Once the medical field gets hold of this that's another million units at least, for example. And then there's schools. Schools like Apple and this product is right up their alley. Those numbers are ridiculous, so I won't state them here but they're huge. Somehow Apple has managed to be first mover in a ten year old market (tablet PC) - that's brilliant.
You have no idea. I don't even like Apple platforms because they're too restrictive for me; they have too much DRM. I like to own my equipment utterly rather than be dependant upon the continued benevolence of some vendor. I would prefer for myself an Android slate on a Tegra 2 or better processor and some good video chipset. But I know hot when I see it and this is it.
Of course it exists as a prototype - Ballmer held it up at CES. There's probably four of them, or ten. It doesn't exist as a product and according to TFA it never will.
iPad sold 300,000 units in the first two days, 600,000 the first week. The thing was almost to 2,000,000 units before the 3G version was released. If you're in tech in the US you probably know someone who owns one and you probably don't know it yet but when they sit down at the conference table with it, you will. The initial US launch volumes were so high that the global and 3G launches were delayed for product. They can't make 'em fast enough. They're reselling at premium prices on Ebay to worldwide customers who can't get 'em yet.
As a vaporware prevention of iPad adoption strategy the HP W7 Atom slate was a complete and utter failure. They may as well have skipped it. Hence the abandonment of the platform. I wish I could get my hands on one of the prototypes. It would make a nice Lucid device.
Don't get me wrong - I'm not an Atom hater. I have four of the Atom boards for desktop and thin client uses with LTSP. I have two I use for servers for various things with Ubuntu and BSD. I have two more in SuperMicro rackmount cases for network IDS and various packet logging purposes. And that's not counting the appliances and thin clients I didn't build myself. One I use with a Parralax USB servo controller for robot control. The Intel Atom is a good bit of gear, and I think Intel is moving in the right direction here but they're not moving fast enough. They had an ARM architecture, XScale, but they sold it to Marvell four years ago. They still have an ARM license. They are terrified that low-watt solutions will cannibalize the market for their desktop and laptop chips I think, so they're not giving with the holistic low-watt platforms and I think that's a mistake. They're in danger of missing a turn here out of fealty to their Redmond partner. Hopefully soon they'll figure this out. Hopefully Intel's already figured this out and the current lack is just the typical development lag between vision and execution.
But as a battery powered tablet CPU with Windows 7? Not today. Between the CPU and the chipset it burns more than 10x the watts of the ARM chips and that's a non-starter. The ARM chips burn less watts than the display or the wireless. They'll play HD video for ten hours straight with a slim battery. There's a Citrix client for them, so if you need real compute from that platform it's available. They're amazing.
Most of the stuff that's developed never makes it out of the labs. Far and away you don't hear about it. There were probably half a dozen variants in development and they just trotted out the one that would most reliably not crash. HP probably had two days notice to dig it out. That's why it had vanilla W7 desktop.
Whether the engineers can't get it to work, or marketing decides it would cannibalize existing products too much, or it compares unfavorably to other products in the market and so erodes brand, or an essential component vendor discontinues a chip or any of a bunch of other reasons, most of these just go away - becoming knicknacks in a cabinet - technology white elephants that nobody remembers. They actually have to do this with lots of teams in parallel because the best laid plans of mice and men aft gang agley. I don't doubt that one of those cabinets has Macbook Airs with 3G and Firewire. Once in a rare while a vendor needs a product and somebody dimly remembers that he worked on a project that had a similar and the cabinets are rummaged looking for it. Mostly though they're forgotten until one day the cabinet is cleaned out and the dusty forgotten white elephants go in the chipper and that's that. A tragedy it is for geeks like me because each of these has a market even if it's small and the defects of these white elephants are far outweighed by the unique cleverness of the engineer set involved - but it is what it is.
It's one thing for Microsoft to support getting their software running on a prototype - they're all over that. It's quite another thing for them to give up control of the desktop on a shipping product. They're just not going to do that - and apparently they're not required to. So the thing would ship with Bing search, Office Trial, IE8 with Silverlight and.NET preinstalled. Add an anti-malware suite and now we're talking about 2GB of RAM and 32GB of flash storage, which runs up the BOM to where it's not competetive against the iPad or Tegra slates and of course it would run like crap because Atom hasn't got the grunt for all that heavy lifting. We're talking 2-3 minute boots at least.
Let me condition that a little bit. A year ago this thing would have rocked my world. There would have been four of them under my Christmas tree. I would have put Linux on them straight away, but I'd have bought them and stared wistfully at the Tegra2 slates, mourning my haste. But now? No.
For a portable device like this tablet if you start with an Intel Atom and add Windows 7 then performance will be poor, costs will be high, battery life will be short. The customer experience will be unsatisfactory because W7 isn't designed for tablet use and Microsoft won't let HP customize it sufficiently to make it useful.
So no, HP didn't screw this up - it was a dumb idea from the start. Its failure was built-in. But they had to show something to try and head off the iPad.
I said so then. The thing didn't do what it was intended to do: kill interest in the iPad and Android slates. The of Microsoft killing progress by announcing vaporware is over.
Incidentally I'm not a greedy jerk. By C3000 max config I only mean four of these (geek porn) and some PCIe sidecars with GPUs. I don't need the double-density blades that put 16 blades with 32 Westmere CPUs in one 5U blade chassis. That would be asking a lot. A nice casual infrastructure with 80Gbps of uplinks would be nice this decade, at least for me. I have modest needs.
Moore's law matters very little in the way that you think of it. We turned a corner here and you don't see it. When performance is good enough, we don't need more performance - we need more performance per Watt.
WebOS is cool and all, but it's going to be three years refining and HP doesn't have that long. This fight may not be over by then, but we'll be able to see the end from there. HP is huge and it doesn't hurt them to explore many avenues at once. While HP is a strong Microsoft partner they also have been huge supporters of Linux from early on. Kernel.org runs on HP donated servers and it has for many years. HP servers all come with a Linux environment, or one you can download for diagnostic purposes so all HP servers work with Linux. Until last month their consumer platforms did too, though just now the diagnostic CD is Windows PE. All HP everything works with Linux. When I need a printer for my network, I don't look anywhere else because the HP stuff is known to work. To be fair, it's not just Linux. HP hardware is predominately Open so it works well with anybody who cares to try their stuff against it. In servers, storage, OS and networking they adhere to open standards because they earnestly believe that your ability to choose their stuff for some of your solution is better than trying to find customers who are willing and able to buy their whole stack from end to end. They're also interested in selling the vertical stack if they can, and as long as they're open about the units, we can probably forgive them for that because whole-stack solutions do have some synergy benefits. As Microsoft's sun sets, HP is well positioned not only to weather that storm, but to profit from it: Windows platforms have almost always been zero margin products given to seed services and such, and the more recently the more so - so the sun setting on Microsoft's hegemony may mean the dawn of a new day of profit margin.
Incidentally, HP Bladesystems have a weird bug with local mounted USB boot DVDROM devices and networking that prevents recognition of FlexNics by VMWare install (several V4+ versions) booted from a DVD attached to the front USB/Video dongle. I don't know what it is, or who at HP to tell about it, but mounting the image through VirtualMedia over the iLO network resolves the issue - though it's slow. Also, chassis connect DVD/CDROMS to blades almost never works and it's not worth the effort to try right now. Maybe future Onboard Administrator firmwares will resolve these problems, but for now use iLO Advanced and virtual media - which you should be using anyway - in the modern era what server wrangler has actual physical access to the server? That's retro. It's probably still an issue for these past three years because you ought not be fondling the physical servers anyway but it would be nice if they fixed that because the Virtual Media connection is slow. I understand they fix that in iLO3, with a gigabit iLO connection and onboard ARM processors for server management but you have to buy new servers to use that. It would be nice if they went back and fixed this retro bug.
Heck, when Windows or VMWare or whatever won't recognize the hardware I boot Ubuntu Live environment to test the hardware and it saves me a lot of work. If I can ping the gateway outside my bladesystem Virtual Connect environment in Ubuntu then the "No compatible network adapters found" message in VMWare is bogus and I can move from diagnosing the hardware/Virtual Connect configuration to figuring out what the heck is VMWare's problem. I did this today. My FC engineer was shocked that a free OS automatically mounted the LUNs he exposed on very fresh 8Gbit FC adapters. I wasn't surprised - I expected it because I know that Linux drivers are almost always first, and Linux supports more hardware than any other OS ever - flat. Also incidentally, the EMC CX4 Model 120 populated with 12 200GB SSD drives totally rocks. The IOPS performance is not to be believed - but have a good set of sytems engineers to milk it for all it's worth because it's spendy.
HP has an Android slate in development. Now that they're dropping the WinTel slate, that looks l
When people get fast, reliable performance that delivers what they need on a platform that's unchained and has awesome battery life, there are going to be some questions about the Windows monopoly on the desktop. People are going to ask things like "why doesn't my desktop work this well? Why doesn't this thing need an anti-malware suite?" When their desktops don't work they'll just grab their slate type PCs and hustle down to the cafeteria and work there. Eventually the questions will evolve to "Do you remember when people worked in cubicles, with desks and those huge boat anchor PCs instead of lounging on couches and stuff like we do now? Man, those were the dark ages of tech. Gosh, I remember when you couldn't just video chat an expert and point the slate at the hardware while he told you left, right to help him find the wiring problem."
Somewhere along the way the world will lose the need for the generation of 2 trillion kilowatt hours of electricity, which is nice.
Yes, I'm aware the HP Slate with Intel Atom and Windows 7 that Steve Ballmer showed at CES is rumored to be dropped today. I said it would be then. The relevant part of that comment:
The tablet that Steve Ballmer announced in partnership with HP in his CES keynote speech will never see the light of day. It is vaporware. It does not exist. Steve-o panicked and held up a half-working concept prototype because he's scared spitless about both the Android tablets working on display at CES and Apple's announcement later this month.
There is no such thing and there will never be. It sucks so much power you need a 3 pound power brick to work it at all. It sucks juice like a diabetic 300LB hummingbird. If it was impressive he would have showed you how it worked. Microsoft is looking around for an answer to Android on Snapdragon and to be blunt, they're still going to be looking at Christmas time when you're putting those cool new Android tablets/music players/movie players/Kidsafe GPS locators/notepad computers under the tree for your kids, your spouse and yourself.
In 2010 Microsoft's innovations are going to be limited to paying people to force you to use Bing instead of allowing you to Google what you want. That's all. And in fact TFA announces just that.
We're going to use slates and similarly low-powered user-facing devices because ubiquitous fast networking and power-efficient technologies mean that the bulk of the work will move once more back into the datacenter, or "cloud" as we're calling it now, and the per-user hardware is going thin and low-watt. This makes a great deal of sense because compute power is watt and hardware intensive - costly. It makes sense to timeshare costly resources and put cheap efficient devices in front of end users. This works really well if the network and devices are performant enough to deliver a reliable usable experience. We've reached that tipping point. Heck, we've passed it. For the eco-sensitive folks this is a grand thing - and for the warmists too. Every Watthour a scrapped desktop doesn't burn is a little bit less coal turned into CO2. It's also grand news for emerging nations because it doesn't just lower costs - it doesn't need the expensive ridiculous electricity generation and delivery capacity that they haven't yet paid to build out and now may not need to. Because they plain don't have the watts they'll adopt early and so take the power edge of the technology curve. For one more time in world technology history it's Advantage: India, China, Pakistan. Because they're lagging getting the tech out to rural areas because they haven't yet had the money or power infrastructure, they don't have to pay for the prior power-hungry coal-sucking IT generations of years past.
It's not about the widget. It's about what you can do with it: the opportunities it enables, the possibilities it creates. If it empowers users to do what they want or need to do or to expand what they can do in new ways and doesn't get in the way, you'll sell millions of 'em.
Well, hell, if you're going to go there... Entire moons made of hydrocarbons. 1E68 times the solar energy that falls on the Earth each day. More water, oxygen and all of the other basic essentials of life than exist on the surface of the Earth, times a billion. Diamonds the size of eggs. Eggs the size of diamonds. More real estate than all the world. And perhaps, Life.
Once you leave Earth orbit, you've spent half of the energy necessary to reach the next star - Proxima Centauri is closer than a round trip to Cleveland.
We should want to go out there, not because of the stuff, but because it's new and we haven't been there yet. But if greed is what it takes: who owns the Asteroids owns the Earth.
Second, of course aid will be coopted, redirected or siphoned to various armed groups. That is the nature of armed groups, to take by force.
By your own admission the aid you're providing is being "coopted, redirected or siphoned to various armed groups." By importing this aid you're empowering and paying those groups to continue to oppress the people you're trying to help. In fact, they need to do that to keep up the flow of aid to steal. I'm going to stick with "that's not really helping".
Naivety? Look at yourself before you try to stick that pin.
The times when our borders were open were also the times when we experienced the greatest growth, the most innovation, the best reputation in the world.
Assimilate the immigrants? Hell, they assimilated us. By all reckoning, we're better for it.
A web page with a form. One poor nerd to sit in a dimly lit cubicle feebly attempting to respond to the 35,000 submitted forms per day, the IT infrastructure to support him (an exchange cluster, an AD + file&print server and bandwidth, a leased pair of IIS servers backed by a two-node MS-SQL Server server cluster). A filing cabinet he steals office supplies from every day.
A "consultant" in Bangalore that sets up said single web page ready to exploit with various viruses.
It does not even begin to pay for serving the inevitable FOIA requests submitted the nerds who thought their submitted forms might actually reach someone useful and irate they've received no response.
All that, and some mentions in the press for "trying" to preserve US manned spaceflight when we all know it's over. What a deal.
Although Android is FOSS most companies that use it actually pay Google for integration services and apps. It's only free for the companies that don't do this, and HTC isn't one of those I don't think. So Android isn't always free even if it's FOSS.
Windows Phone 7 and Windows Embedded 7 are a rebranding. They have nothing to do with Windows 7. Perhaps they're also a rewrite but they've rebooted the development team twice in the past 2 years. It seems unlikely they've managed to develop a secure, robust, user friendly OS from scratch that's multi-platform friendly since the last reboot. Exceedingly unlikely, considering who they work for and that boss's output in the realm to date. If the products are of the poor quality one would expect from that history and the incredible depth of suck that is the history of Windows Mobile and Windows Embedded then the only thing this will accomplish is to rub off what little shine is on Windows 7 by associating it with products with absolutely no redeeming value.
Windows 7 doesn't quite suck as much as Microsoft's previous OS products. It seems relatively stable and for the most part doesn't suck all of the performance out of energy efficient platforms. The security seems to have somewhat more of a reasonable balance between insecure and unusable. It may one day reach 60% share on the desktop if Microsoft doesn't screw it up. It doesn't yet have enough positive inertia to tow sucktackular phone and embedded products into common acceptance and every bit of lift W7 gives up right now sets back a lot of other stuff.
Most likely what HTC has done here is pulled an EV1. The end result will probably be the same. Robert Marsh (headsurfer) became disgusted with the backlash (customer flight, hate mail, vilification in the press, death threats) from the one bad decision of paying $800k for Linux license from SCO under an NDA contract that let SCO spin the deal into more than $3M in the press. He sold out to a venture capital group. Everyone's Internet was absorbed by ThePlanet, removing the tarnish of the EV1 brand applied with this bad deal. EV1 is no more. This is very probably the end result that Microsoft was looking for in driving the HTC deal - threaten with lawyers and offer a sweet compromise with secret terms, filled with hidden poison. When all the geeks that adored HTC/Android for its openness vomit vitriol all over it for this sellout, they either abandon their Android efforts and embrace Windows Embedded 7, or wither and die. It's a win/win for Microsoft. That's some slick strategy - we'll see if it pays off. Like I said though, one day the details will be available on Groklaw. Note that absolutely none of this has anything to do with the relative value or merits of the platforms, software or IP claims. This is a very competetive IT phase, and it's best if your CEO isn't a pussy. It would also be good if when the Microsoft lawyers came calling everybody remembered that IT'S A TRAP! Novell is suffering some of the same abuse from their deal with the devil. If you dance with the devil, you will pay his fee.
Microsoft getting paid for every device whether or not they participated at all in its creation is not "levelling the playing field". The reality distortion field is really strong up there in Redmond, isn't it? That's the only POV you could be coming from to be looking at this as levelling a field unfairly tilted against Microsoft. That is, you'ld have to be from a rather different planet than the rest of us.
This deal might hold up for a while, but eventually we'll all read about every sordid detail in court papers on Groklaw. The Machiavellian bastards who could get away with this sort of thing have long since retired.
Microsoft isn't suffering in mobile because they're being undercut by cheaper options, either. They're losing share in mobile because their products are, and have for a long time been, utter unforgivable crap forced down the throats of manufacturers through sheer market force. Consumers in business struggled long and hard against the crashing apps, the rebooting platforms, the sluggish performance, the antiquated interfaces. They gave it a good go, because they believed in the power of Microsoft and it's ability to somehow someday make it right and they were disappointed. Now they've been there, done that, don't need to go there again.
The iPhone has none of that - it just works. Likewise the Android phones. Even though - as is alleged - Microsoft is throwing Intel under the bus to deliver as much as they can of Windows 7 on ARM, it doesn't change the fact that their code bloat, their performance issues, their security issues, their legacy architectures will inevitably drag the platform into the dirt. Perhaps that's for the best as Microsoft extends it's marginally acceptible "7" branding to this platform in the hope of salvaging WinMo, degrading the value of the number 7 as well.
HP has finally realized that in addition to being in competition with Cisco/VMWare/EMC in the datacenter, they're also in competition with Apple in the consumer gadgetry department. This probably comes out of Apple passing Microsoft on the S&P 500 last week. This is actually a good thing. $1.2B isn't a big deal to get Palm's patent portfolio and add some phones to their product list as well.
It also means they have no intention of going down with the WinTel ship. They're going to make a fight of it.
I hope they come out with a decent ARM based Android slate. I won't be buying that Intel Atom+Windows 7 version.
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Even modern climate scientists agree that the Earth should now be cooling. That's a huge part of their objection - that manmade warming is preventing the onset of a global ice age that is due. We should, according to them, embrace the natural reality of shrinking arable land and expansion of glaciers because that is the natural course according to their calculations. The warming of the Earth must be prevented even if we benefit from it.
And of the billions who would starve to death in that course? They don't figure. Rounding errors. Casualties of math.
Explain that to them.
It's best to design software for limits that are frankly absurd. Since I coined the phrase "absurd limit theory", let's delve a little bit into it.
A second divided into increments enumerated by fractions of a 64 bit integer is less than the differential travel of differing wavelengths of light over a planck unit of distance. It's a smaller unit of time than matters to our current understanding. 2^64 seconds is more time than the entire history of our Universe from beginning to end even in the most ridiculous theory. Even counting photons and every known subatomic particle, an index of 2^64 is sufficient to enumerate each and every one with a unique ID that represents that one and no other. In each dimension angles discriminated in units of 1/2^64 of a circle are fine enough for any imaginable purpose.
Given that we are close to understanding these elements, 128 bits would probably be a more durable unit. 128 bits should give us a few more years of discrimination before the physical sciences discover even finer units of time, mass and distance. Some even theorize now that 64 bits are the limit: that space, mass and time have a granularity and that finer resolutions are absurd. To that I say...
If software must be designed with limits it should use limits so absurd that no user no matter how hypothetical could be constrained by those limits because the designer does not know how long his application will persist nor how its use will evolve.
It's not the most efficient design that wins. Ultimately it's the most persistent.
I know you were going for funny and got it, so I get the joke and I'm not hateful. You had to dig back a quarter century for that.
For those who don't remember: Once upon a time IBM owned computing. They owned the datacenter and the IBM PC was the only PC. It was not until their dominance in the field was threatened by challengers that the phrase "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" became common. It's an '80's reference. It was the end of IBM's dominance in the datacenter. Once the salespeople had to say that the game was over.
Incidentally, the IBM PC was an accidental rogue engineering program that got out of control and managed to release product before Corporate understood what was happening. By the time the suits understood what was going on it was all over. There's a lesson there.
If the salesman has to resort to telling you that you won't get fired for buying his product, then he lied. You boss pays you to think about what's best for your organization, not to avoid unemployment.
But you don't need to be a prick. She's sincere, she just doesn't see it yet. Give her a break, and try to master the art of persuasive selling.
Barbie, you've got some good insight and usually I agree with you. But not today.
I'm getting old. I really like using RDP and Citrix on my iPod Touch. Really, I do. And I'd like to read books and watch movies on it too. But the screen is too small for my elderly eyes even with the best glasses I can get. I need something... bigger. Bigger pockets I can get. Good suits will tailor any pocket you want, or in informal environments you can go with cargo pockets or a Safari vest. I've seen iPad pocket designed clothing already, so it's out there if you look. Better eyes are currently not available at retail. The phone form factor is not big enough to share.
The tablet market is most definitely not going to nosedive. It has reached escape velocity. Apple has sold 1.3 million iPads. That would be a large multiplier of all the other tablet solutions, ever - and that's millions of people who have barely started showing off their neat gear to other people who are going to buy them. We haven't had time yet for a commercial purchase order to clear, so there have been no enterprise deployments yet and there definitely will be. IT geeks love this thing because it's optimal for always-on acess to their servers. They can travel now. Sales pros? They'll fall in love with it too because all the docs, stats and vendor collateral fit on the local storage so if there are questions at the table they don't have to waffle - they can provide proof from the vendor, case studies and slideshows. Once the medical field gets hold of this that's another million units at least, for example. And then there's schools. Schools like Apple and this product is right up their alley. Those numbers are ridiculous, so I won't state them here but they're huge. Somehow Apple has managed to be first mover in a ten year old market (tablet PC) - that's brilliant.
You have no idea. I don't even like Apple platforms because they're too restrictive for me; they have too much DRM. I like to own my equipment utterly rather than be dependant upon the continued benevolence of some vendor. I would prefer for myself an Android slate on a Tegra 2 or better processor and some good video chipset. But I know hot when I see it and this is it.
Of course it exists as a prototype - Ballmer held it up at CES. There's probably four of them, or ten. It doesn't exist as a product and according to TFA it never will.
iPad sold 300,000 units in the first two days, 600,000 the first week. The thing was almost to 2,000,000 units before the 3G version was released. If you're in tech in the US you probably know someone who owns one and you probably don't know it yet but when they sit down at the conference table with it, you will. The initial US launch volumes were so high that the global and 3G launches were delayed for product. They can't make 'em fast enough. They're reselling at premium prices on Ebay to worldwide customers who can't get 'em yet.
As a vaporware prevention of iPad adoption strategy the HP W7 Atom slate was a complete and utter failure. They may as well have skipped it. Hence the abandonment of the platform. I wish I could get my hands on one of the prototypes. It would make a nice Lucid device.
Don't get me wrong - I'm not an Atom hater. I have four of the Atom boards for desktop and thin client uses with LTSP. I have two I use for servers for various things with Ubuntu and BSD. I have two more in SuperMicro rackmount cases for network IDS and various packet logging purposes. And that's not counting the appliances and thin clients I didn't build myself. One I use with a Parralax USB servo controller for robot control. The Intel Atom is a good bit of gear, and I think Intel is moving in the right direction here but they're not moving fast enough. They had an ARM architecture, XScale, but they sold it to Marvell four years ago. They still have an ARM license. They are terrified that low-watt solutions will cannibalize the market for their desktop and laptop chips I think, so they're not giving with the holistic low-watt platforms and I think that's a mistake. They're in danger of missing a turn here out of fealty to their Redmond partner. Hopefully soon they'll figure this out. Hopefully Intel's already figured this out and the current lack is just the typical development lag between vision and execution.
But as a battery powered tablet CPU with Windows 7? Not today. Between the CPU and the chipset it burns more than 10x the watts of the ARM chips and that's a non-starter. The ARM chips burn less watts than the display or the wireless. They'll play HD video for ten hours straight with a slim battery. There's a Citrix client for them, so if you need real compute from that platform it's available. They're amazing.
Most of the stuff that's developed never makes it out of the labs. Far and away you don't hear about it. There were probably half a dozen variants in development and they just trotted out the one that would most reliably not crash. HP probably had two days notice to dig it out. That's why it had vanilla W7 desktop.
Whether the engineers can't get it to work, or marketing decides it would cannibalize existing products too much, or it compares unfavorably to other products in the market and so erodes brand, or an essential component vendor discontinues a chip or any of a bunch of other reasons, most of these just go away - becoming knicknacks in a cabinet - technology white elephants that nobody remembers. They actually have to do this with lots of teams in parallel because the best laid plans of mice and men aft gang agley. I don't doubt that one of those cabinets has Macbook Airs with 3G and Firewire. Once in a rare while a vendor needs a product and somebody dimly remembers that he worked on a project that had a similar and the cabinets are rummaged looking for it. Mostly though they're forgotten until one day the cabinet is cleaned out and the dusty forgotten white elephants go in the chipper and that's that. A tragedy it is for geeks like me because each of these has a market even if it's small and the defects of these white elephants are far outweighed by the unique cleverness of the engineer set involved - but it is what it is.
It's one thing for Microsoft to support getting their software running on a prototype - they're all over that. It's quite another thing for them to give up control of the desktop on a shipping product. They're just not going to do that - and apparently they're not required to. So the thing would ship with Bing search, Office Trial, IE8 with Silverlight and .NET preinstalled. Add an anti-malware suite and now we're talking about 2GB of RAM and 32GB of flash storage, which runs up the BOM to where it's not competetive against the iPad or Tegra slates and of course it would run like crap because Atom hasn't got the grunt for all that heavy lifting. We're talking 2-3 minute boots at least.
Let me condition that a little bit. A year ago this thing would have rocked my world. There would have been four of them under my Christmas tree. I would have put Linux on them straight away, but I'd have bought them and stared wistfully at the Tegra2 slates, mourning my haste. But now? No.
For a portable device like this tablet if you start with an Intel Atom and add Windows 7 then performance will be poor, costs will be high, battery life will be short. The customer experience will be unsatisfactory because W7 isn't designed for tablet use and Microsoft won't let HP customize it sufficiently to make it useful.
So no, HP didn't screw this up - it was a dumb idea from the start. Its failure was built-in. But they had to show something to try and head off the iPad.
It looks like Dell started on the right foot.
I said so then. The thing didn't do what it was intended to do: kill interest in the iPad and Android slates. The of Microsoft killing progress by announcing vaporware is over.
Incidentally I'm not a greedy jerk. By C3000 max config I only mean four of these (geek porn) and some PCIe sidecars with GPUs. I don't need the double-density blades that put 16 blades with 32 Westmere CPUs in one 5U blade chassis. That would be asking a lot. A nice casual infrastructure with 80Gbps of uplinks would be nice this decade, at least for me. I have modest needs.
If you want to offend me you're going to have to try a lot harder than that. Think midgets, ferrets and duct tape - and square it.
You're fine - faux offense is in this case just my artistic license.
I didn't warn you there would be math.
Moore's law matters very little in the way that you think of it. We turned a corner here and you don't see it. When performance is good enough, we don't need more performance - we need more performance per Watt.
WebOS is cool and all, but it's going to be three years refining and HP doesn't have that long. This fight may not be over by then, but we'll be able to see the end from there. HP is huge and it doesn't hurt them to explore many avenues at once. While HP is a strong Microsoft partner they also have been huge supporters of Linux from early on. Kernel.org runs on HP donated servers and it has for many years. HP servers all come with a Linux environment, or one you can download for diagnostic purposes so all HP servers work with Linux. Until last month their consumer platforms did too, though just now the diagnostic CD is Windows PE. All HP everything works with Linux. When I need a printer for my network, I don't look anywhere else because the HP stuff is known to work. To be fair, it's not just Linux. HP hardware is predominately Open so it works well with anybody who cares to try their stuff against it. In servers, storage, OS and networking they adhere to open standards because they earnestly believe that your ability to choose their stuff for some of your solution is better than trying to find customers who are willing and able to buy their whole stack from end to end. They're also interested in selling the vertical stack if they can, and as long as they're open about the units, we can probably forgive them for that because whole-stack solutions do have some synergy benefits. As Microsoft's sun sets, HP is well positioned not only to weather that storm, but to profit from it: Windows platforms have almost always been zero margin products given to seed services and such, and the more recently the more so - so the sun setting on Microsoft's hegemony may mean the dawn of a new day of profit margin.
Incidentally, HP Bladesystems have a weird bug with local mounted USB boot DVDROM devices and networking that prevents recognition of FlexNics by VMWare install (several V4+ versions) booted from a DVD attached to the front USB/Video dongle. I don't know what it is, or who at HP to tell about it, but mounting the image through VirtualMedia over the iLO network resolves the issue - though it's slow. Also, chassis connect DVD/CDROMS to blades almost never works and it's not worth the effort to try right now. Maybe future Onboard Administrator firmwares will resolve these problems, but for now use iLO Advanced and virtual media - which you should be using anyway - in the modern era what server wrangler has actual physical access to the server? That's retro. It's probably still an issue for these past three years because you ought not be fondling the physical servers anyway but it would be nice if they fixed that because the Virtual Media connection is slow. I understand they fix that in iLO3, with a gigabit iLO connection and onboard ARM processors for server management but you have to buy new servers to use that. It would be nice if they went back and fixed this retro bug.
Heck, when Windows or VMWare or whatever won't recognize the hardware I boot Ubuntu Live environment to test the hardware and it saves me a lot of work. If I can ping the gateway outside my bladesystem Virtual Connect environment in Ubuntu then the "No compatible network adapters found" message in VMWare is bogus and I can move from diagnosing the hardware/Virtual Connect configuration to figuring out what the heck is VMWare's problem. I did this today. My FC engineer was shocked that a free OS automatically mounted the LUNs he exposed on very fresh 8Gbit FC adapters. I wasn't surprised - I expected it because I know that Linux drivers are almost always first, and Linux supports more hardware than any other OS ever - flat. Also incidentally, the EMC CX4 Model 120 populated with 12 200GB SSD drives totally rocks. The IOPS performance is not to be believed - but have a good set of sytems engineers to milk it for all it's worth because it's spendy.
HP has an Android slate in development. Now that they're dropping the WinTel slate, that looks l
When people get fast, reliable performance that delivers what they need on a platform that's unchained and has awesome battery life, there are going to be some questions about the Windows monopoly on the desktop. People are going to ask things like "why doesn't my desktop work this well? Why doesn't this thing need an anti-malware suite?" When their desktops don't work they'll just grab their slate type PCs and hustle down to the cafeteria and work there. Eventually the questions will evolve to "Do you remember when people worked in cubicles, with desks and those huge boat anchor PCs instead of lounging on couches and stuff like we do now? Man, those were the dark ages of tech. Gosh, I remember when you couldn't just video chat an expert and point the slate at the hardware while he told you left, right to help him find the wiring problem."
Somewhere along the way the world will lose the need for the generation of 2 trillion kilowatt hours of electricity, which is nice.
Yes, I'm aware the HP Slate with Intel Atom and Windows 7 that Steve Ballmer showed at CES is rumored to be dropped today. I said it would be then. The relevant part of that comment:
The tablet that Steve Ballmer announced in partnership with HP in his CES keynote speech will never see the light of day. It is vaporware. It does not exist. Steve-o panicked and held up a half-working concept prototype because he's scared spitless about both the Android tablets working on display at CES and Apple's announcement later this month.
There is no such thing and there will never be. It sucks so much power you need a 3 pound power brick to work it at all. It sucks juice like a diabetic 300LB hummingbird. If it was impressive he would have showed you how it worked. Microsoft is looking around for an answer to Android on Snapdragon and to be blunt, they're still going to be looking at Christmas time when you're putting those cool new Android tablets/music players/movie players/Kidsafe GPS locators/notepad computers under the tree for your kids, your spouse and yourself.
In 2010 Microsoft's innovations are going to be limited to paying people to force you to use Bing instead of allowing you to Google what you want. That's all. And in fact TFA announces just that.
We're going to use slates and similarly low-powered user-facing devices because ubiquitous fast networking and power-efficient technologies mean that the bulk of the work will move once more back into the datacenter, or "cloud" as we're calling it now, and the per-user hardware is going thin and low-watt. This makes a great deal of sense because compute power is watt and hardware intensive - costly. It makes sense to timeshare costly resources and put cheap efficient devices in front of end users. This works really well if the network and devices are performant enough to deliver a reliable usable experience. We've reached that tipping point. Heck, we've passed it. For the eco-sensitive folks this is a grand thing - and for the warmists too. Every Watthour a scrapped desktop doesn't burn is a little bit less coal turned into CO2. It's also grand news for emerging nations because it doesn't just lower costs - it doesn't need the expensive ridiculous electricity generation and delivery capacity that they haven't yet paid to build out and now may not need to. Because they plain don't have the watts they'll adopt early and so take the power edge of the technology curve. For one more time in world technology history it's Advantage: India, China, Pakistan. Because they're lagging getting the tech out to rural areas because they haven't yet had the money or power infrastructure, they don't have to pay for the prior power-hungry coal-sucking IT generations of years past.
It's not about the widget. It's about what you can do with it: the opportunities it enables, the possibilities it creates. If it empowers users to do what they want or need to do or to expand what they can do in new ways and doesn't get in the way, you'll sell millions of 'em.
Well, hell, if you're going to go there... Entire moons made of hydrocarbons. 1E68 times the solar energy that falls on the Earth each day. More water, oxygen and all of the other basic essentials of life than exist on the surface of the Earth, times a billion. Diamonds the size of eggs. Eggs the size of diamonds. More real estate than all the world. And perhaps, Life.
Once you leave Earth orbit, you've spent half of the energy necessary to reach the next star - Proxima Centauri is closer than a round trip to Cleveland.
We should want to go out there, not because of the stuff, but because it's new and we haven't been there yet. But if greed is what it takes: who owns the Asteroids owns the Earth.
Second, of course aid will be coopted, redirected or siphoned to various armed groups. That is the nature of armed groups, to take by force.
By your own admission the aid you're providing is being "coopted, redirected or siphoned to various armed groups." By importing this aid you're empowering and paying those groups to continue to oppress the people you're trying to help. In fact, they need to do that to keep up the flow of aid to steal. I'm going to stick with "that's not really helping".
Naivety? Look at yourself before you try to stick that pin.
The times when our borders were open were also the times when we experienced the greatest growth, the most innovation, the best reputation in the world.
Assimilate the immigrants? Hell, they assimilated us. By all reckoning, we're better for it.
A web page with a form. One poor nerd to sit in a dimly lit cubicle feebly attempting to respond to the 35,000 submitted forms per day, the IT infrastructure to support him (an exchange cluster, an AD + file&print server and bandwidth, a leased pair of IIS servers backed by a two-node MS-SQL Server server cluster). A filing cabinet he steals office supplies from every day.
A "consultant" in Bangalore that sets up said single web page ready to exploit with various viruses.
It does not even begin to pay for serving the inevitable FOIA requests submitted the nerds who thought their submitted forms might actually reach someone useful and irate they've received no response.
All that, and some mentions in the press for "trying" to preserve US manned spaceflight when we all know it's over. What a deal.
Although Android is FOSS most companies that use it actually pay Google for integration services and apps. It's only free for the companies that don't do this, and HTC isn't one of those I don't think. So Android isn't always free even if it's FOSS.
Windows Phone 7 and Windows Embedded 7 are a rebranding. They have nothing to do with Windows 7. Perhaps they're also a rewrite but they've rebooted the development team twice in the past 2 years. It seems unlikely they've managed to develop a secure, robust, user friendly OS from scratch that's multi-platform friendly since the last reboot. Exceedingly unlikely, considering who they work for and that boss's output in the realm to date. If the products are of the poor quality one would expect from that history and the incredible depth of suck that is the history of Windows Mobile and Windows Embedded then the only thing this will accomplish is to rub off what little shine is on Windows 7 by associating it with products with absolutely no redeeming value.
Windows 7 doesn't quite suck as much as Microsoft's previous OS products. It seems relatively stable and for the most part doesn't suck all of the performance out of energy efficient platforms. The security seems to have somewhat more of a reasonable balance between insecure and unusable. It may one day reach 60% share on the desktop if Microsoft doesn't screw it up. It doesn't yet have enough positive inertia to tow sucktackular phone and embedded products into common acceptance and every bit of lift W7 gives up right now sets back a lot of other stuff.
Most likely what HTC has done here is pulled an EV1. The end result will probably be the same. Robert Marsh (headsurfer) became disgusted with the backlash (customer flight, hate mail, vilification in the press, death threats) from the one bad decision of paying $800k for Linux license from SCO under an NDA contract that let SCO spin the deal into more than $3M in the press. He sold out to a venture capital group. Everyone's Internet was absorbed by ThePlanet, removing the tarnish of the EV1 brand applied with this bad deal. EV1 is no more. This is very probably the end result that Microsoft was looking for in driving the HTC deal - threaten with lawyers and offer a sweet compromise with secret terms, filled with hidden poison. When all the geeks that adored HTC/Android for its openness vomit vitriol all over it for this sellout, they either abandon their Android efforts and embrace Windows Embedded 7, or wither and die. It's a win/win for Microsoft. That's some slick strategy - we'll see if it pays off. Like I said though, one day the details will be available on Groklaw. Note that absolutely none of this has anything to do with the relative value or merits of the platforms, software or IP claims. This is a very competetive IT phase, and it's best if your CEO isn't a pussy. It would also be good if when the Microsoft lawyers came calling everybody remembered that IT'S A TRAP! Novell is suffering some of the same abuse from their deal with the devil. If you dance with the devil, you will pay his fee.
Microsoft getting paid for every device whether or not they participated at all in its creation is not "levelling the playing field". The reality distortion field is really strong up there in Redmond, isn't it? That's the only POV you could be coming from to be looking at this as levelling a field unfairly tilted against Microsoft. That is, you'ld have to be from a rather different planet than the rest of us.
This deal might hold up for a while, but eventually we'll all read about every sordid detail in court papers on Groklaw. The Machiavellian bastards who could get away with this sort of thing have long since retired.
Microsoft isn't suffering in mobile because they're being undercut by cheaper options, either. They're losing share in mobile because their products are, and have for a long time been, utter unforgivable crap forced down the throats of manufacturers through sheer market force. Consumers in business struggled long and hard against the crashing apps, the rebooting platforms, the sluggish performance, the antiquated interfaces. They gave it a good go, because they believed in the power of Microsoft and it's ability to somehow someday make it right and they were disappointed. Now they've been there, done that, don't need to go there again.
The iPhone has none of that - it just works. Likewise the Android phones. Even though - as is alleged - Microsoft is throwing Intel under the bus to deliver as much as they can of Windows 7 on ARM, it doesn't change the fact that their code bloat, their performance issues, their security issues, their legacy architectures will inevitably drag the platform into the dirt. Perhaps that's for the best as Microsoft extends it's marginally acceptible "7" branding to this platform in the hope of salvaging WinMo, degrading the value of the number 7 as well.
I saw one of their products today. I took a picture.
HP has finally realized that in addition to being in competition with Cisco/VMWare/EMC in the datacenter, they're also in competition with Apple in the consumer gadgetry department. This probably comes out of Apple passing Microsoft on the S&P 500 last week. This is actually a good thing. $1.2B isn't a big deal to get Palm's patent portfolio and add some phones to their product list as well.
It also means they have no intention of going down with the WinTel ship. They're going to make a fight of it.
I hope they come out with a decent ARM based Android slate. I won't be buying that Intel Atom+Windows 7 version.