Yep. pretty much right there with you. I'm actually still on my webOS Pre- phone, waiting for the G-nex to come out on Sprint. I wish more companies would just make a quality phone with bog standard Android. A Nokia one would be great, they make such good quality stuff. But not if I have to deal with Winblows. Not gonna happen.
Pretty much the only thing I see saving Nokia is Android. Make some awesome quality Android handsets and customers will return. Make them with a nice clean stock Android loadout instead of some dumbass custom crapware laden ugly UI and you'll stand out from the pack even more. (Geeks will embrace you too. Word of Mouth is powerful advertising!)
Please forgive my ignorance, as I am not currently an Android user. (Still on my Palm Pre- while I wait for the G-Nex to be released on Sprint) But coming from a mostly ad-free platform, is there any way to completely BLOCK ads on Android? (like Adblock Plus and No Script do for Firefox?)
Loli Manga? I would argue (as a Canadian) that a one year minimum sentence should have been given -- the Crown was very lenient. I (we) have very little tolerance for this kind of behaviour. I believe Ryan Matheson was given all due consideration, and should consider himself lucky. Given the circumstances, the Crown gave every possible leniency in this matter. As a Canadian, I would call for a 5 year sentence should Mr. Matheson ever repeat this offence.
Wow. Remind me never to show you my Range Murata artbook collection or anything by Nisheida. You'd probably try to kill me.
And people wonder why I never visit Canada despite having a previous residency AND living minutes from the border. Yeesh!
Not to put too fine a point on it, but pretty much ALL regulators, in ALL liberal democracies are captured in one way or another.
This is why "Big Business" likes regulation and spends money on politicians (read: lefties) that support more regulation, They know they OWN the regulators, and will be able to easily set up the regulations to benefit themselves to the exclusion of up and coming competition. Let's face it; Central Bureaucrats are cheap to buy and easy to manipulate for the power they wield.
This is why sane people support the ideals of conservatism and libertarianism. Smaller government with limited and specifically delineated powers is far more difficult to corrupt and much less worth the effort. Having a flatter and more distributed government that is more "local" than "federal" means that corruption is much more expensive to achieve than it is with a large federal bureaucratic government. Also, with less (not none. Less.) regulation generally, there is less market distortion and the bar to entry is significantly lower. This enables more competition and everyone benefits.
I always find it funny how many people continue to cling to the centralized and bureaucratic model for government when it has so often been proven to be an utter failure. TFA is yet another example.
Since you are a neurologist, I would be interested in your thoughts on using this interface technology in repairing damaged neural pathways or in creating ones that never grew properly (IE: Spinal injury or Spina Bifida)
It seems to me that the ability to simply lay in conductive neural lattices to connect broken pathways would be a HUGE boon *plegics of all stripes and for birth defect victims.
Unless I am hugely underestimating the complexity of the task (likely) or simply mis-reading the article (less likely, although still possible.)
I was going to write out a very long response to your criticism describing how my minimalist approach is actually quite insightful, particularly in the ways in which it evokes the zen-like qualities of haiku. Then I decided that this would be a better response...
Cursed by poor marketing, weak launch hardware and a limited budget from Palm, Webos never really had a fair shot at the market. HP bought them at a time when they were transitioning to a new CEO who wanted to move them in a services direction, and so they never got the love they needed from HP.
Hopefully open sourcing it will give it new life. It would be nice to have a REAL open source platform, and not the pseudo open source with have with Android, where it's really only open to the handset makers and carriers and users have to resort to ugly hacks to make it work.
I wouldn't mind buying a used Android handset or even an iphone 4S and wiping and re-imaging with Webos. That would be awesome! Finally a good quality OS on good hardware. Kickass.
And regular gasoline engines can be relatively cheaply converted to run on NatGas.
The best part being that simply installing a compression and pumping station in your garage will allow you to fill up at home and simply transfer your former gasoline expenses to your home heating bill.
The only issue is travel. Like many alternative fuels, traveling causes problems due to the lack of public fill stations. Thankfully, in the case of Nat Gas there is already a delivery infrastructure in place. It's just a matter of setting up the pumps and connecting them to existing lines. So it's far cheaper an alternative to set up than electric due to fast fill times, and easier to swap to due to close compatibility with existing technology.
I still prefer diesel, but Nat Gas (or even LP) are good second choices.
The jammers don't work like that. They are much simpler.
GPS jammers simply send out garbage data on a VERY strong local GPS signal and swamp the GPS receiver with crap data. It can't hear the whispering satellite signal because of the "turned up to 11" white noise speaker right in it's ear. Not complicated at all.
This entire article is stupid. Essentially they are making the technical claim that the car isn't REALLY "bricked" because "Only one or two cells are really bad, and they can be fixed."
Here's the problem with that argument: If a handful of bad cells in a battery pack cause the pack to be unusable, AND the car to be un-tow-able AND require the ENTIRE PACK to be replaced at a very high cost, then for all intents and purposes the car IS "bricked".
Techno-sementic arguments about the precise definition of "bricked" don't matter AT ALL. The damn thing won't work anymore without paying an arm and a leg to have it shipped back to a tesla service center and have the ultra-expensive pack replaced. It's Bricked.
Ultimately this points to two issues:
1) Tesla's battery management system is woefully inadequate and hasn't gone through proper real-world testing. As the darling of EV lovers and large portions of the government they were given a pass (and large amounts of taxpayer money) and QC wasn't done properly.
2) ANY vehicle power system the requires a complete core unit replacement part by simply leaving the vehicle sitting unused for a "normal" amount of time in "normal" environmental conditions is NOT ready for prime-time. If this is the state of EV's across the market, and not just a tesla-specific issue, then EV's are in no way ready for the mass market. Niche market, yes, mass market, NO.
Hopefully this will turn out to be just a Tesla problem and they can get it fixed quickly.
Or he's NOT and you are just assuming he is because you either dislike the blog/blogger or are utterly ignorant of the facts. The communication emails are public knowledge, and the 40 grand cost is NOT "made up from whole cloth" and has been confirmed by Tesla.
I really hate seeing this stupid meme passed around as though it had any semblance to reality.
Gas prices in the US are not "artificially low". Like many other places they are artificially high, mostly because of our historical reluctance to tap our own supply, despite it being readily available (Shale oil, gulf oil, tundra oil, the list goes on.)
Now, they certainly APPEAR low when compared to prices around the globe, particularly in Europe. But that is not because America has found a way to magically push prices down. It's because European countries push prices artificially HIGH through excessive taxation and regulation.
Lower taxes and lift burdensome regulation (including allowing additional refinery capacity to be built) and you will see prices drop everywhere after a time. The Market works amazingly well at providing for all and keeping prices low when the government doesn't get in the way.
Well, considering it isn't intended to be a scientific text, I'd say that assessment is pretty well spot on.
Although, I should note that the Psalms writer was talking about the current condition of mankind. IE: the average maximum life span at the time of the writing. More to the point, he was pointing out the shortness and fleeting nature of our lives, not trying to make a proclamation on the maximum time anyone might live. That seems obvious from the context.
1. It was the "Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil", not the "Tree of Life."
2. He knew it was wrong because God told him so. To Paraphrase: "You can eat anything that grows here in the garden except the fruit from that tree over there. If you eat that fruit you'll die, so don't eat it." Not a good/evil thing so much as a "Hey that's bad stuff, if you're smart you'll obey my instructions and not eat it" kind of thing.
3. Adam and Eve were kicked out AFTER they ate from the tree and were corrupted by sin. It was as punishment for disobeying his instructions. Also, they then started to age and die.
4. He put the tree there as a basic test of obedience. He wanted to be obeyed, but he also wanted people to have the free choice to do it. Not that making the wrong choice would be without consequences, but the choice had to be there or it wasn't ever REALLY a free will. (If you have only one choice, is it really free will to choose it?)
Adam and Eve chose to go their own way, as have most of humanity since that day. Thus we have sin, the fallen state of man, and the need for redemption through Christ. Of course, it is all still free will. You don't HAVE to believe in and obey God, but that doesn't mean there won't be consequences for choosing not to. Every choice has consequences. What sense would it make if they didn't?
The bible only talks about Sin bringing death to humanity. Animals can't sin, they are locked into their basic nature. (IE: they aren't Sentient) So Lions ate lambs or anything else pretty much like they do today, with the exception that God prevented them from eating his Humans.
It really gets interesting when you think that there is NO indication for how LONG Adam and Eve spent in the garden. We know Adam was around 1000 years old when he finally died, but we don't know how much of that was spent during his "immortal" years. It may very well be that he and Eve only lived for a few years after they ate the fruit, although we know it was long enough to raise Cain and Abel to adulthood..
Actually, he traded immortality for the knowledge of good and evil. Essentially for a loss of innocence. Pretty crappy trade if you ask me.
Also, it is fairly certain that Adam and Eve were banging regularly already. (They were both naked, physically mature, and had all the functional bits as far as we know.)
Well. Glad to know your position isn't coming from one of total ignorance./Sarc
By the way, publishing to the WebOS App catalog has always been FREE. Just submit it to HP for inclusion and as long as it isn't total crap or spyware/virus filled, they will put it in. Failing that, WebOS still has a robust user community and you can easily have an app published through the community catalog as well.
As far as FREE tablet goes, have you gotten one from Apple or Google (or any android maker) yet? No? Then you are just blowing smoke out your ass and being petulant when it isn't needed.
The thing is that developing for WebOS is so stupidly simple it's almost laughable. Just take your EXISTING Anrdoid or iOS application, run it through HP's FREE app converter to convert it, do a little bug-testing and squashing and you're pretty much ready to go.
Hell, if the small (at the time) Rovio team could convert all of Angry Birds to WebOS from iOS in EIGHT HOURS, I think you can manage it too. Unless you are saying that you aren't smart enough or just too lazy, which, given your generally snotty attitude, might just be the case.
Basically every design we saw come out of HP after they bought Palm was a Palm design that was already "in the pipeline" and ready to release. So we never actually got to see any "HP" hardware designs, it was all leftover Palm designs until Apotheker committed professional suicide by shutting down the mobile division and threatening to shut down the PC division.
Honestly, as soon as Mark Hurd got pushed out as HP exec I knew that Palm was in trouble. Apotheker was a "Services" guy, never a "Products" guy. the CEO generally sets the company course, so I reluctantly predicted that he would not do much with Palm. Sadly, i was proven right (Although I really wanted to be wrong.)
The sad irony about is that if HP had REALLY invested in Palm and spent some real money on R&D and marketing, they could have had a winner on their hands. In the end, they still "Spent" the money by losing market value and stock price, only they lost more there than they EVER would have spent on Palm if they had pursued it. So stupid.
Here's hoping Whitman is able to bring WebOS back. I'd love me some WebOS on some fresh new hardware!
Also, the old CEO, Leo Apotheker, did screw up and cause WebOS to flop. That's part of why he was fired. That and his crazy statements about getting out of the PC market borked up HP stock prices and caused the stock holders to lose BILLIONS in value in a single day. (That'll get anyone fired.)
I think that it is more likely that we can chalk this up to just Meg being a little under informed about Android. ("Never attribute to malice what can easily be attributed to ignorance" and all that, dont'cha know.)
I personally LOVE what she's done with WebOS by fully open-sourcing it and putting it on a nice LONG business cycle before expecting gains, but I just think she's talking from a position of ignorance of how Google's profit structure works with Android.
Hopefully this will give her the opportunity to learn a bit more about it and perhaps find things that HP can take from Google's approach that will help bring WebOS back to the mainstream.
As far as I'm concerned, WebOS is still light years ahead of both iOS and Android in terms of UI ease-of-use. It was never really given a proper shot to succeed and deserves a much more significant spot in the market than it's gotten.
That was as much about the tablets themselves as it was about the tablet "experience" in the OS.
Yes, WinXP and Vista were NOT "tablet ready" in any real sense of the word. but then again, absolutely NONE of the hardware was really 'tablet ready" either.
I remember working with a "late model" tablet about 6 months before the iPad was announced. This was a top of the line demonstration model that we were testing for possible use in some specialized applications with the company I was working for at the time.
What was this tablet like? Imagine a 14 inch 4:3 resolution screen laptop from that era With the screen mounted directly to what would normally be the keyboard surface, and no keyboard. Just an ordinary laptop, sans keyboard.
It was heavy, bulky and SLOOOOOW. Prone to overheating when put in it's protective case, HOT and uncomfortable to hold when not in it's protective case and just generally difficult to use. And that's BEFORE you even start talking about working with software or the UI of Windows XP tablet edition!
The big "Sea Change" that Apple brought about was as much about the shitty hardware of existing tablets as it was about the inadequate UI. In many cases, it was MOSTLY about the hardware, as the old style win-tabs would turn people totally off before they even booted the damn things up!
In contrast, the Apple iPad was sleek, reasonably lightweight and uncomplicated. The carry-over of the touch and gesture-based interaction from the iPhone made it simple and largely intuitive to use, and it made tablets even more enjoyable to use than laptops or netbooks for surfing and casual use (which is what most consumers do with them anyway.)
So it's no surprise that the iPad did well. To be honest, even if iOS hadn't been ported to the iPad and it had used a more touch-friendly version of OSX it would have been a smashing success based purely on the hardware alone. Loading it with iOS and tying it to the App store just sealed the deal.
You still don't get it, do you? Attitudes like your are why people like me are squeezed from all sides just trying to get ahead.
I seriously doubt your are an entrepreneur, your attitude is very much the opposite of anyone who has had to work significant hours for no pay to get a business off the ground. You sound like someone who is totally disconnected from the reality of what us middle class people experience.
Perhaps for YOU taxes have gone down, but mine have gone UP. Not just the direct taxes I pay, but all the indirect ones. The cost of gas at the pump that has gone up because the government has FOR YEARS prevented us from drilling for our own oil. The cost of groceries at the store that keeps going up because of the cost of fuel to produce and transport it. All the little ancillary costs that are ultimately tied back to the cost of government. A government that is TOO LARGE and tries to do too many things.
Social program expenditures are over 60% of our national budget. You talk about the "Gain of others" and "taking care of people" as though this money just comes from the air. That's SOCIALIST talk. Not Capitalist language. A Capitalist would tell people to go out and invest or spend their own money, rather than have it processed through the "broken glass fallacy" government bureaucracy where the lion's share of the money goes to pay for government, not for helping other people.
If you give to charity, great! So do I. (What little I have available) would it not be better to have private charitable organizations who are FAR more efficient handle the work of helping people out, and have our government do only what it is Constitutionally constrained to do?
I'm glad that you want to spend money to help people, but you need to understand that it is NOT CHARITY to force people to pay higher taxes to help others. That's just theft.
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Yep. pretty much right there with you. I'm actually still on my webOS Pre- phone, waiting for the G-nex to come out on Sprint. I wish more companies would just make a quality phone with bog standard Android. A Nokia one would be great, they make such good quality stuff. But not if I have to deal with Winblows. Not gonna happen.
Pretty much the only thing I see saving Nokia is Android. Make some awesome quality Android handsets and customers will return. Make them with a nice clean stock Android loadout instead of some dumbass custom crapware laden ugly UI and you'll stand out from the pack even more. (Geeks will embrace you too. Word of Mouth is powerful advertising!)
Please forgive my ignorance, as I am not currently an Android user. (Still on my Palm Pre- while I wait for the G-Nex to be released on Sprint) But coming from a mostly ad-free platform, is there any way to completely BLOCK ads on Android? (like Adblock Plus and No Script do for Firefox?)
Loli Manga? I would argue (as a Canadian) that a one year minimum sentence should have been given -- the Crown was very lenient. I (we) have very little tolerance for this kind of behaviour. I believe Ryan Matheson was given all due consideration, and should consider himself lucky. Given the circumstances, the Crown gave every possible leniency in this matter. As a Canadian, I would call for a 5 year sentence should Mr. Matheson ever repeat this offence.
Wow. Remind me never to show you my Range Murata artbook collection or anything by Nisheida. You'd probably try to kill me.
And people wonder why I never visit Canada despite having a previous residency AND living minutes from the border. Yeesh!
Not to put too fine a point on it, but pretty much ALL regulators, in ALL liberal democracies are captured in one way or another.
This is why "Big Business" likes regulation and spends money on politicians (read: lefties) that support more regulation, They know they OWN the regulators, and will be able to easily set up the regulations to benefit themselves to the exclusion of up and coming competition. Let's face it; Central Bureaucrats are cheap to buy and easy to manipulate for the power they wield.
This is why sane people support the ideals of conservatism and libertarianism. Smaller government with limited and specifically delineated powers is far more difficult to corrupt and much less worth the effort. Having a flatter and more distributed government that is more "local" than "federal" means that corruption is much more expensive to achieve than it is with a large federal bureaucratic government. Also, with less (not none. Less.) regulation generally, there is less market distortion and the bar to entry is significantly lower. This enables more competition and everyone benefits.
I always find it funny how many people continue to cling to the centralized and bureaucratic model for government when it has so often been proven to be an utter failure. TFA is yet another example.
Since you are a neurologist, I would be interested in your thoughts on using this interface technology in repairing damaged neural pathways or in creating ones that never grew properly (IE: Spinal injury or Spina Bifida)
It seems to me that the ability to simply lay in conductive neural lattices to connect broken pathways would be a HUGE boon *plegics of all stripes and for birth defect victims.
Unless I am hugely underestimating the complexity of the task (likely) or simply mis-reading the article (less likely, although still possible.)
What do you think?
I was going to write out a very long response to your criticism describing how my minimalist approach is actually quite insightful, particularly in the ways in which it evokes the zen-like qualities of haiku. Then I decided that this would be a better response...
**FACEPALM**
Preventing the good from becoming the enemy of the perfect.
Also,
It works, Bitches!
Cursed by poor marketing, weak launch hardware and a limited budget from Palm, Webos never really had a fair shot at the market. HP bought them at a time when they were transitioning to a new CEO who wanted to move them in a services direction, and so they never got the love they needed from HP.
Hopefully open sourcing it will give it new life. It would be nice to have a REAL open source platform, and not the pseudo open source with have with Android, where it's really only open to the handset makers and carriers and users have to resort to ugly hacks to make it work.
I wouldn't mind buying a used Android handset or even an iphone 4S and wiping and re-imaging with Webos. That would be awesome! Finally a good quality OS on good hardware. Kickass.
And regular gasoline engines can be relatively cheaply converted to run on NatGas.
The best part being that simply installing a compression and pumping station in your garage will allow you to fill up at home and simply transfer your former gasoline expenses to your home heating bill.
The only issue is travel. Like many alternative fuels, traveling causes problems due to the lack of public fill stations. Thankfully, in the case of Nat Gas there is already a delivery infrastructure in place. It's just a matter of setting up the pumps and connecting them to existing lines. So it's far cheaper an alternative to set up than electric due to fast fill times, and easier to swap to due to close compatibility with existing technology.
I still prefer diesel, but Nat Gas (or even LP) are good second choices.
The jammers don't work like that. They are much simpler.
GPS jammers simply send out garbage data on a VERY strong local GPS signal and swamp the GPS receiver with crap data. It can't hear the whispering satellite signal because of the "turned up to 11" white noise speaker right in it's ear. Not complicated at all.
This entire article is stupid. Essentially they are making the technical claim that the car isn't REALLY "bricked" because "Only one or two cells are really bad, and they can be fixed."
Here's the problem with that argument: If a handful of bad cells in a battery pack cause the pack to be unusable, AND the car to be un-tow-able AND require the ENTIRE PACK to be replaced at a very high cost, then for all intents and purposes the car IS "bricked".
Techno-sementic arguments about the precise definition of "bricked" don't matter AT ALL. The damn thing won't work anymore without paying an arm and a leg to have it shipped back to a tesla service center and have the ultra-expensive pack replaced. It's Bricked.
Ultimately this points to two issues:
1) Tesla's battery management system is woefully inadequate and hasn't gone through proper real-world testing. As the darling of EV lovers and large portions of the government they were given a pass (and large amounts of taxpayer money) and QC wasn't done properly.
2) ANY vehicle power system the requires a complete core unit replacement part by simply leaving the vehicle sitting unused for a "normal" amount of time in "normal" environmental conditions is NOT ready for prime-time. If this is the state of EV's across the market, and not just a tesla-specific issue, then EV's are in no way ready for the mass market. Niche market, yes, mass market, NO.
Hopefully this will turn out to be just a Tesla problem and they can get it fixed quickly.
Or he's NOT and you are just assuming he is because you either dislike the blog/blogger or are utterly ignorant of the facts. The communication emails are public knowledge, and the 40 grand cost is NOT "made up from whole cloth" and has been confirmed by Tesla.
Geez, people, RTFA for crying out loud.
Jalopnik article on the issue:
http://jalopnik.com/5887265/tesla-motors-devastating-design-problem
Jalopnik article about the attempt to smear the whistleblower:
http://jalopnik.com/5887499/who-is-trying-to-smear-the-tesla-battery-problem-whistleblower
Gallery of screenshots of emails:
http://jalopnik.com/5887504/tesla-emails-gallery/gallery/1
Read read read. Then rethink and reassess.
I really hate seeing this stupid meme passed around as though it had any semblance to reality.
Gas prices in the US are not "artificially low". Like many other places they are artificially high, mostly because of our historical reluctance to tap our own supply, despite it being readily available (Shale oil, gulf oil, tundra oil, the list goes on.)
Now, they certainly APPEAR low when compared to prices around the globe, particularly in Europe. But that is not because America has found a way to magically push prices down. It's because European countries push prices artificially HIGH through excessive taxation and regulation.
Lower taxes and lift burdensome regulation (including allowing additional refinery capacity to be built) and you will see prices drop everywhere after a time. The Market works amazingly well at providing for all and keeping prices low when the government doesn't get in the way.
Well, considering it isn't intended to be a scientific text, I'd say that assessment is pretty well spot on.
Although, I should note that the Psalms writer was talking about the current condition of mankind. IE: the average maximum life span at the time of the writing. More to the point, he was pointing out the shortness and fleeting nature of our lives, not trying to make a proclamation on the maximum time anyone might live. That seems obvious from the context.
Umm.. No. you've got that all pretty much wrong.
1. It was the "Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil", not the "Tree of Life."
2. He knew it was wrong because God told him so. To Paraphrase: "You can eat anything that grows here in the garden except the fruit from that tree over there. If you eat that fruit you'll die, so don't eat it." Not a good/evil thing so much as a "Hey that's bad stuff, if you're smart you'll obey my instructions and not eat it" kind of thing.
3. Adam and Eve were kicked out AFTER they ate from the tree and were corrupted by sin. It was as punishment for disobeying his instructions. Also, they then started to age and die.
4. He put the tree there as a basic test of obedience. He wanted to be obeyed, but he also wanted people to have the free choice to do it. Not that making the wrong choice would be without consequences, but the choice had to be there or it wasn't ever REALLY a free will. (If you have only one choice, is it really free will to choose it?)
Adam and Eve chose to go their own way, as have most of humanity since that day. Thus we have sin, the fallen state of man, and the need for redemption through Christ. Of course, it is all still free will. You don't HAVE to believe in and obey God, but that doesn't mean there won't be consequences for choosing not to. Every choice has consequences. What sense would it make if they didn't?
The bible only talks about Sin bringing death to humanity. Animals can't sin, they are locked into their basic nature. (IE: they aren't Sentient) So Lions ate lambs or anything else pretty much like they do today, with the exception that God prevented them from eating his Humans.
It really gets interesting when you think that there is NO indication for how LONG Adam and Eve spent in the garden. We know Adam was around 1000 years old when he finally died, but we don't know how much of that was spent during his "immortal" years. It may very well be that he and Eve only lived for a few years after they ate the fruit, although we know it was long enough to raise Cain and Abel to adulthood..
Actually, he traded immortality for the knowledge of good and evil. Essentially for a loss of innocence. Pretty crappy trade if you ask me.
Also, it is fairly certain that Adam and Eve were banging regularly already. (They were both naked, physically mature, and had all the functional bits as far as we know.)
Well. Glad to know your position isn't coming from one of total ignorance. /Sarc
By the way, publishing to the WebOS App catalog has always been FREE. Just submit it to HP for inclusion and as long as it isn't total crap or spyware/virus filled, they will put it in. Failing that, WebOS still has a robust user community and you can easily have an app published through the community catalog as well.
As far as FREE tablet goes, have you gotten one from Apple or Google (or any android maker) yet? No? Then you are just blowing smoke out your ass and being petulant when it isn't needed.
The thing is that developing for WebOS is so stupidly simple it's almost laughable. Just take your EXISTING Anrdoid or iOS application, run it through HP's FREE app converter to convert it, do a little bug-testing and squashing and you're pretty much ready to go.
Hell, if the small (at the time) Rovio team could convert all of Angry Birds to WebOS from iOS in EIGHT HOURS, I think you can manage it too. Unless you are saying that you aren't smart enough or just too lazy, which, given your generally snotty attitude, might just be the case.
Actually, the hardware was ALL Palm.
Basically every design we saw come out of HP after they bought Palm was a Palm design that was already "in the pipeline" and ready to release. So we never actually got to see any "HP" hardware designs, it was all leftover Palm designs until Apotheker committed professional suicide by shutting down the mobile division and threatening to shut down the PC division.
Honestly, as soon as Mark Hurd got pushed out as HP exec I knew that Palm was in trouble. Apotheker was a "Services" guy, never a "Products" guy. the CEO generally sets the company course, so I reluctantly predicted that he would not do much with Palm. Sadly, i was proven right (Although I really wanted to be wrong.)
The sad irony about is that if HP had REALLY invested in Palm and spent some real money on R&D and marketing, they could have had a winner on their hands. In the end, they still "Spent" the money by losing market value and stock price, only they lost more there than they EVER would have spent on Palm if they had pursued it. So stupid.
Here's hoping Whitman is able to bring WebOS back. I'd love me some WebOS on some fresh new hardware!
The CEO of HP is Meg Whitman. A Woman.
Also, the old CEO, Leo Apotheker, did screw up and cause WebOS to flop. That's part of why he was fired. That and his crazy statements about getting out of the PC market borked up HP stock prices and caused the stock holders to lose BILLIONS in value in a single day. (That'll get anyone fired.)
HP already has opened WebOS. Did it about a month ago.
I think that it is more likely that we can chalk this up to just Meg being a little under informed about Android. ("Never attribute to malice what can easily be attributed to ignorance" and all that, dont'cha know.)
I personally LOVE what she's done with WebOS by fully open-sourcing it and putting it on a nice LONG business cycle before expecting gains, but I just think she's talking from a position of ignorance of how Google's profit structure works with Android.
Hopefully this will give her the opportunity to learn a bit more about it and perhaps find things that HP can take from Google's approach that will help bring WebOS back to the mainstream.
As far as I'm concerned, WebOS is still light years ahead of both iOS and Android in terms of UI ease-of-use. It was never really given a proper shot to succeed and deserves a much more significant spot in the market than it's gotten.
That was as much about the tablets themselves as it was about the tablet "experience" in the OS.
Yes, WinXP and Vista were NOT "tablet ready" in any real sense of the word. but then again, absolutely NONE of the hardware was really 'tablet ready" either.
I remember working with a "late model" tablet about 6 months before the iPad was announced. This was a top of the line demonstration model that we were testing for possible use in some specialized applications with the company I was working for at the time.
What was this tablet like? Imagine a 14 inch 4:3 resolution screen laptop from that era With the screen mounted directly to what would normally be the keyboard surface, and no keyboard. Just an ordinary laptop, sans keyboard.
It was heavy, bulky and SLOOOOOW. Prone to overheating when put in it's protective case, HOT and uncomfortable to hold when not in it's protective case and just generally difficult to use. And that's BEFORE you even start talking about working with software or the UI of Windows XP tablet edition!
The big "Sea Change" that Apple brought about was as much about the shitty hardware of existing tablets as it was about the inadequate UI. In many cases, it was MOSTLY about the hardware, as the old style win-tabs would turn people totally off before they even booted the damn things up!
In contrast, the Apple iPad was sleek, reasonably lightweight and uncomplicated. The carry-over of the touch and gesture-based interaction from the iPhone made it simple and largely intuitive to use, and it made tablets even more enjoyable to use than laptops or netbooks for surfing and casual use (which is what most consumers do with them anyway.)
So it's no surprise that the iPad did well. To be honest, even if iOS hadn't been ported to the iPad and it had used a more touch-friendly version of OSX it would have been a smashing success based purely on the hardware alone. Loading it with iOS and tying it to the App store just sealed the deal.
You still don't get it, do you? Attitudes like your are why people like me are squeezed from all sides just trying to get ahead.
I seriously doubt your are an entrepreneur, your attitude is very much the opposite of anyone who has had to work significant hours for no pay to get a business off the ground. You sound like someone who is totally disconnected from the reality of what us middle class people experience.
Perhaps for YOU taxes have gone down, but mine have gone UP. Not just the direct taxes I pay, but all the indirect ones. The cost of gas at the pump that has gone up because the government has FOR YEARS prevented us from drilling for our own oil. The cost of groceries at the store that keeps going up because of the cost of fuel to produce and transport it. All the little ancillary costs that are ultimately tied back to the cost of government. A government that is TOO LARGE and tries to do too many things.
Social program expenditures are over 60% of our national budget. You talk about the "Gain of others" and "taking care of people" as though this money just comes from the air. That's SOCIALIST talk. Not Capitalist language. A Capitalist would tell people to go out and invest or spend their own money, rather than have it processed through the "broken glass fallacy" government bureaucracy where the lion's share of the money goes to pay for government, not for helping other people.
If you give to charity, great! So do I. (What little I have available) would it not be better to have private charitable organizations who are FAR more efficient handle the work of helping people out, and have our government do only what it is Constitutionally constrained to do?
I'm glad that you want to spend money to help people, but you need to understand that it is NOT CHARITY to force people to pay higher taxes to help others. That's just theft.