ansy

Apple doesn't care one whiff about any single app's livelihood. If integrating something improves the user experience, then it gets integrated.

iOS 5 is already taking aim at Instapaper (Reading List), the entire ToDo category (Reminders), non-SMS messaging apps (iMessage), Zinio (Newsstand), half the camera apps out there, and a swath of Twitter apps [1]. You can almost bet if there is a swell of applications with similar features that Apple will wipe them all out in the next major version of iOS.

What's one more weather app? Apple is already taking aim at them by adding hourly forecasts to the built in weather app for iOS 5.

[1] http://www.apple.com/ios/ios5/features.html

I think if HP has to flood the market with zero margin devices to make a dent it did the right thing by getting out of that business once and for all. It has better ways of occupying its resources.

EDIT: I fully realize the TouchPad costs more to make than $99 and the margin during the fire sale was less than zero. If anything it probably barely covers the cost of supporting the units and software through the support period given some fixed costs of support and the small number of units. That only drives home the point further that HP was right to just shut it down and get out.

Interesting, if a little more kitchen sink than I have come to expect from Apple.

Maybe Apple will use this and tie it in to NOAA's National Weather Service in the USA.

http://www.weather.gov/view/nationalwarnings.php

It could save a significant number of lives if a tornado, flash flood, or forest fire was tearing through nearby.

This guide should probably mention that TRIM support is not enabled for after-market SSDs under Snow Leopard or Lion. You are relying completely on the SSD chipset's internal garbage collector to tidy up dirty pages and stave off SSD rigor mortis.

Luckily, the OtherWorldComputing SSD the author chose has a SandForce chipset with a very good garbage collector unlike say an Intel SSD which doesn't. Whether or not the author was aware of that when selecting this particular drive over any other, the guide fails to provide this explanation to the reader.

I've read that the TRIM Support Enabler software will turn on TRIM in Snow Leopard or Lion for after-market SSDs, so Ars might want to check that out and maybe mention it in this guide.

http://www.groths.org/?page_id=322

Likewise an investigation into different SSD firmware updaters is probably warranted. Many firmware updaters for SSD drives I looked into will only run in Windows which can be a real pain considering this is a guide for MacBooks.

I don't think it's clear, but it seems like the person who wrote the article is a QA tester and the developer who suggested the fix was another person.

I doubt they would fire a QA tester just for finding a bug. He might have been laid off with a bunch of other people or he might have been getting a big head about his prize defect. Granted, it is kind of a big defect. But some people can be sore winners.

I find F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby's placement on the list appropriate and Plato's to be suitably ironic. Gatsby had a library of uncut (i.e. never opened) books and Plato argued against placing too much importance on books themselves versus actually attaining knowledge.

This is really an example of taking Google's strengths and making them out to be weaknesses. Google's search algorithm is tuned to what actually works for most people. Does anyone search for Java and click on coffee links? Or links for Java the island in Indonesia? Based on these results I would bet not. The thousands if not millions of people that typed Java before you didn't want coffee or islands. They wanted the Java virtual machine and programming language so all those long clicks to Java programming sites and JVM downloads have corrected the results page to reflect that.

But if you typed "cup of java" or "java island" there would be no mistake. Those people wanted coffee and Indonesia. So that's what links you get.

I have used DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine. But it is not competition for Google. Google is much, much more advanced.

If I typed in a proper name and that proper name was tied to an address in my area such as by being in the local white pages or having an address on a website, I would see the local result for that name because Google looked up the geolocation of my IP. That sounds a little creepy, but I got what I wanted. Google gave that link extra weight for being near my location therefore it wasn't buried on page 50. That's incredibly smart. How would DDG solve the same problem? It doesn't even try.

I don't have good citations for these figures, but I'm pulling this out of Stephen Fishman's book "Working for Yourself."

In one informal survey of self-employed people it was found those who charged fixed fees earned on average 150% more than those who charged by the hour for the same services. In another survey by a trade journal it found that self-employed people who charged a fixed fee earned 95% more than similar people who charged by the hour. I believe these surveys were across industries and not specific to software.

Make that what you will, but it seems to suggest on average you're much better off charging a flat fee. I can conjecture a few reasons why.

1) If you're good enough to have the confidence to charge a fixed-fee, you can estimate based on the normal hourly rate and add a healthy amount of contingency. Because your estimates will be accurate you will almost always come out ahead compared to going with a straight hourly rate.

2) Customers are willing to pay a premium for cost certainty even if that cost ends up being higher.

3) By putting a cap on the cost of a project, the developer is less likely or unable to exploit that so the project may actually get completed faster and more efficiently than if a payment ceiling wasn't over his head.

Controlling a fixed price project is difficult and simple at the same time. It's difficult because it's so easy to hang yourself if you're not careful. It's easy because all you need to do is define the scope ahead of time and agree up front that the price and time needs to be adjusted when the scope changes. So whenever the client asks for something outside your mutual understanding of scope you have a provision in the contract that states you must amend the contract for the difference in cost and development time. It's called change control, and can be as simple as "hey, that feature is way beyond what we agreed upon. I can do it but it will cost an extra $4,000 and the delivery date needs to get pushed back two weeks. Sign this contract amendment to that affect if you still want me to do it."

Likewise, if something that was assumed in the contract turns out to be untrue, that can be revisited with a contract change. For example, assume there is an open source library for barcode scanning. If it later turns out there isn't one suitable for the task, you're completely within the contract to say, "Hey, I know we were hoping to save some time and money by using this library. But we agreed it was a risk and after I used it more it has too many issues and this endangers the success of the project. We can buy this commercial package for $4,000 but I will need to redo a lot of my work. I'll give you a break on my labor, but it will still cost $6,000 and add another week if you agree to it." Something like that.

Guys, it's called AirPrint and Apple advertises it quite visibly. It's one of the major features of iOS 4. You can see an extensive tout for it on Apple's website here

http://www.apple.com/ipad/features/airprint.html

All of the printers that support AirPrint are made by HP. AirPrint is really just an adapter on top of HP's proprietary ePrint. I believe ePrint even lets you send documents to the printer over email from a computer or any other device.

http://h71028.www7.hp.com/enterprise/us/en/ipg/HPeprint-solu...

Google Android also has an adapter to directly print to HP's ePrint printers through Google's Cloud Print

http://www.hp.com/united-states/campaigns/hp-eprint-google-c...

Normally Cloud Print for Android (or any other device) works by running a print server which is bundled with the Chrome web browser on a Windows PC connected to a normal printer. Instead with ePrint the network print server exists on the printer itself so you can send documents to it directly.

Obviously, the HP TouchPad works with ePrint natively out of the box. So all of these mobile operating systems are designed to work with the same line of printers which are all made by HP.

Technically, Android can work with more printers assuming you want to rely on a Windows box to act as your print server.

"Competing with lower margins is stupid"

Fixed that for you. If you can have lower prices with the same or higher margins that's called an epic win.

The TouchPad is a real disaster. 10% sell rate even after promotions? This is like ET for the Atari 2600. Best Buy was ready to just send back 245,000 out of the 270,000 it ordered because it couldn't sell them. At least HP agreed to give them away at liability cost instead of dumping them in a landfill.

Notice HP did not pull the Pre and Veer phones from the shelves or put them on fire sale.

HP's reasons for keeping the webOS lights on are probably threefold. 1) Phones are still for sale. 2) HP has a liability to show some support for webOS devices it sold or risk a class action lawsuit. 3) HP could still sell the Palm assets to someone and the company is lot more valuable if it comes with employees.

Technically, Amazon could make the Kindle in the USA out of parts shipped in from various Asian countries even though it could not make each of those components in the USA as well.

But then, what really could be made entirely in one country? Especially when you consider each component, the raw materials, the machinery used, and so on down the line for each of those.

I don't necessarily disagree with the author that there is value to keeping a process "in house" which needs to be including in any cost savings calculations and that American companies are prone to discounting that value when making decisions. But at some point some components or steps in the manufacturing process might be necessary or optimal to leave in the hands of others whether foreign or domestic.

SMS is arguably less secure than email over an SSL connection. Why would you even consider sending credit card details over SMS? Not only can SMS messages be sniffed and you have no idea if carriers are encrypting it or unencrypting it, but your SMS messages are stored unprotected on both the sending and receiving phones. These could get lost, stolen, or hacked. News Corp cell phone hacking scandal? Celebrity cell phone hackig scandals? If you have an smart phone and sync back up to a computer it copies over your SMS history in plain text. If a police officer pulls you over he has a device that can copy over the entire contents of your cell phone. Common criminals or anyone else aren't far behind.

The best way to exchange credit card information safely is when every step is certified to be PCI compliant which has very strict rules for how credit card information is transmitted, handled, and stored and who can handle them.

I would sooner speak my credit card number to a trusted vendor's call center employee than SMS it anywhere. I have yet to give out my credit card over the phone and I'd never email it.

Only if HP can't sell the Palm assets to someone first. That should be priority number one. If the new buyer wants to open source it let them go through the trouble of due diligence.

If webOS can't be sold, which would be surprising in this environment, then HP could donate the source to Apache or Eclipse and maybe get a write off out of it.

I see the similarity, although webOS is nowhere near the heart and soul of HP that Mac OS is to Apple.

Should HP's management be fighting a two front war against IBM and Apple? Maybe not. Apple dumped Xserve, has nearly dumped the Mac Pro, and pretty much ignores enterprise users entirely despite being on a stratospheric trajectory. WebOS probably means as much to HP's bottom line as Xserve did to Apple's and HP is treading water.

Consolidating on a consistent corporate vision is the first step to being like Apple. HP's vision is all muddled between being a consumer company and being a business company. Hopefully HP can figure out who it wants to be so it can start doing it well.

I believe the comparison HP would prefer you use is to IBM. Unlike Apple, HP has a whole lot more than consumer PCs. Between its servers and EDS, it's arguably much more like IBM.

IBM was synonymous with the PC especially in business and government and especially with Thinkpad laptops. Hell, other PCs were always called "IBM Compatible" because an the modern PC was really just a compatible copy of IBM's version of the personal computer. But IBM wasn't executing well and failing to keep up with the Dells of the world on the consumer side of things.

So IBM spun off its consumer products like its PC division (to Lenovo), its peripherals like keyboards and mice (to Unicomp), and its printers (as Lexmark). Then it doubled down on big iron, midrange servers, and made a huge play on software and consulting services.

In the end, IBM survives, is profitable, and nobody thinks it's going away any time soon. What remains of HP has long been growing into a copy of the modern IBM with a huge, low margin PC business hanging off it that grows only by cannibalizing the market share of other low margin PC manufacturers exiting the market entirely. To think that the remaining half of the company wouldn't survive after spinning off the PC business is just silly.

Facebook has a responsibility to do the right thing or lose a lot. It has executives, investors, and assets which are all exposed to lawsuits and criminal investigation.

A dude in Thailand that makes a free "Angry Birds Cheats" app does not have a lot to lose. In fact he could probably get away with putting something up on the app store with a stolen identity. The app could suck down millions of people's address books with real names, real birthdays, real phone numbers, real addresses, a network graph, and maybe more completely silently. You know the network activity indicator doesn't even activate unless it's flipped on and off programmatically? Best case scenario Apple finds out, takes the app down, and tells the Thai police to go find the guy? Good luck with that. Worst case scenario nobody even notices and the app disappears after sinking off the charts.

There is zero consumer protection against the latter and quite frankly the former shouldn't be an issue to begin with either. Facebook was getting away with it without getting caught. How many of those other high throughput apps that aren't from Facebook receive the same scrutiny from the public and researchers?

Now Apple just needs to do something about the address book and we're good. I don't particularly like any random app having silent, unrestricted access to my entire address book. It's only a matter of time before we find out some super popular free app has been sucking down contact lists and I don't trust the Apple review process to protect users.

There should be a "this app is trying to access your address book" notification and per app permissions in Settings just like Locations and Push Notifications.

Enterprise software is a hell of a lot more than racks of web servers and managing licenses for Microsoft Office. Any publicly traded company, even one that is not a software company, has tons of business processes that are specific to its way of doing business and its industry. That requires various specialized if not custom software and lots and lots of glue to put it all together. On top of that, businesses want to see into all that activity so all the data from that software needs to be extracted, collected, combined, and reported on properly which requires technical and business expertise specific to that company's business practices and technology choices. The addition of more cloud services increases this burden while decreasing other burdens.

HP makes lots of money through EDS selling consulting services and outsourcing services to do all that stuff. Stuff that is being fed by the move to more and more cloud services whether internal or external.

And when I say enterprise services, I mean software as a service stuff like Salesforce. There are more services that business need than Salesforce such as data warehousing that HP is in a strong position to enter or dominate. That said, even though something like Salesforce is a turn key solution hosted off site, it doesn't mean there isn't an enterprise sales process. A middle manager doesn't buy up 1,000 seats of Salesforce subscriptions at $65 per month without going through the normal enterprise approval process. I've seen it and it can take several months even though your average small business owner can sign up in 10 minutes with a corporate credit card. The real deal involves contract scrutiny and due diligence work. And just because Salesforce is easier, it doesn't mean you don't need a ton of development and integration work to bring it in line with your existing practices and software tools which usually requires outside experts at least for training if not complete outsourcing.

What? The cloud IS Oracle, IBM, SAP, and HP's future revenue model. They are going to build the cloud, build the enterprise cloud services, and bill out consultants specializing in the cloud. HP's future is nothing but the cloud moving forward. HP makes the servers that are the cloud. HP's business software will sit on its servers instead of yours. HP's consultants will charge you $$$ to tell you which services work for you, provision everything, configure it, do the integration, and host it for you in the cloud for a recurring monthly fee per user.

WebOS has nothing to do with capitalizing on the cloud. It's just one of many clients to the cloud.

This was perhaps a good plan delivered with the poorest tact. The reality distortion field seems to be working in reverse for Leo & Co.

Moving toward an enterprise only strategy could make HP healthier and more profitable in the long run. It may even reap additional benefits from a consolidation of vision.

The PSG offers less and less synergy with the rest of the company with each passing year. Especially if WebOS is dead, which everyone knew but nobody wanted to admit.

The problem is HP could have kept webOS in zombie mode and discretely shopped around the company under the guise of licensing talks. Maybe HP already did that and its last option walked out the door.

And the same with the PSG. HP could have kept that under wraps and saved the news until the transition was nearly complete. "By the way, PSG, the #1 PC maker in the world, is doing great and we think it will do even better as an autonomous company which will happen as soon as the SEC allows it starting from today."

Instead HP delivered an abortion of bad news with little to no concern how it would be received. It's like Apotheker thought to himself, "this is clearly the best solution" and therefore it requires absolutely no explanation. Everyone should just "get it" like he does.

I disagree pretty strongly. All of the major game consoles are an IBM PowerPC CPU with nVidia/ATI graphics. Everything is off the shelf. The Xbox 360, GameCube, Wii, and Playstation 3 are pretty much all based on those same designs (although the PS3's CPU has crazy after-market modifications which really didn't work out so well).

The same can be said about phones and portable video game systems. It's all ARM CPUs with Imagine GPUs. Android, iOS, Windows Phone 7, Blackberry, webOS, Nintendo GBA/DS/3DS, Sony Vita all use the exact same chips from the same design firms.

The big hardware differentiator is what cost/performance balance you want to strike. Newer architectures with newer manufacturing processes cost more plain and simple. And there is a spectrum of other off the shelf components to round out the package.

There can be some play in getting more out of a design with engineering tricks or getting better components at the same cost with economies of scale. Or you can corner the market by buying out the entire manufacturing capacity of the best components to deny your competitors (or vice versa). But it's pretty much you get what you pay for.

Nintendo builds hardware two to three generations behind to save a lot on costs. Not because it doesn't know how to get something faster and better. The upcoming Wii U is basically an older PowerPC CPU with an older ATI GPU. If Nintendo wanted, it could create a crazy powerful console with a $1000 CPU and dual $600 GPUs that nobody would buy. All it needed to do was tell IBM and ATI what it wanted. It wasn't a matter of engineering that steered them away, but a matter of economics. Which if you remember right worked great in the short term for the Wii. But as everyone already knew wasn't a long term play. Hence the earlier-than-everyone-else release of the Wii U.

I am skeptical about Palm's IP finding its way to Amazon. Amazon seems to have invested heavily in Android not only with its own store but a whole line of tablets and phones coming out very, very soon. The talent might be good. But the patents aren't critical and there is no way Amazon wants to go down the same path that just failed for HP.

Really, Google would be the best suitor of Palm if anyone was going to buy it. Google needs those patents bad. Google can use webOS code and engineers on ChromeOS. The UI designers can go to the Android team. And Google just got a hardware division that can absorb any remaining hardware guys.

If Google can get all that for $2 billion it should write the check tomorrow. Bargain.

Nintendo will have to have a string of spectacular failures before it starts share cropping. Remember n64? Remember GameCube? Both were pretty lackluster compared to Super NES. VirtualBoy? Disaster.

The Wii U and 3DS might be disappointing, but Nintendo is a survivor. It has the internal support to last through dry spells on the strength of first party titles alone.

It would be very difficult for a company as resilient and conservative as Nintendo to sink itself in such a short time frame. Remember, too, this company also started off making playing cards 100 years ago.

The only bad end I could see in Nintendo's immediate future would be an aggressive if not hostile takeover. I believe its market cap is only $20 billion, and supposedly half of that is in cash. If Apple or Microsoft wanted to pay a premium for the ultimate maker of killer apps this is the time to make a move. In another cycle it will be too late: the mobile wars will be decided and/or Nintendo will likely have recovered. Who knows how well the company would survive a takeover though.

It appears this kills any chance of another manufacturer picking up webOS. If HP can't make it work why should anyone else try?

Hindsight is 20/20. Google and Palm could have made a deal. At least then the WebOS team could merge with the ChromeOS team. And Google would have that patent trove for a bargain price. And an in-house manufacturer, too, if that's what it wanted.

Too late for that now. At best Google will get the patents at a significant premium. ChromeOS is too far along to benefit from WebOS. And now Google has Motorola, what would it do with Palm's hardware?

What the hell? This is a serious change in direction. HP was supposed to transform its PC division into a higher margin business by more aggressively pursuing the luxury market. Also the PC division was part of the WebOS master plan by bundling it with every new PC by the end of the year.

What does this mean for HP's consumer business? What does it mean for WebOS? It seems like Leo is returning to his SAP comfort zone which looks a lot more like IBM than Apple.

Even though the article does not mention Compaq, I can see the new company inheriting the brand name instead of sharing HP. But just how much of the consumer business do they plan to abandon?

I am not a physical therapist, but I did find a video of some interesting hand/wrist/elbow exercises which can be done at a desk or while riding in a car. [1]

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hlWgH3_0NU

HP should just give a tablet away to anyone who signs up to be a developer even if it is a back door for consumers to get a nearly free tablet. Maybe even put the free tablet at the end of an Ares tutorial [1].

It's a little late for a back to school bundle sale. At this point we might see TouchPads go for insane prices on Black Friday. But that's still a couple months away.

HP needs to be more aggressive about give aways. Google has been giving away Android devices to thousands if not tens of thousands of people. This excess stock is a pretty good opportunity to get devices in the right hands.

[1] http://ares.palm.com/Ares/about.html

Are you saying Sega is a model for success? The same Sega that was so bankrupt after going software only that it was bought by a pachinko machine company (Sammy) that eventually gutted the game development teams to right the sinking ship? That Sega? I can't tell if your comment is meant to be sarcastic.

Nintendo needs to be an Apple (which it arguably already is), not a Sega. Keep the hardware software vertical integration. It's Nintendo's most valuable asset.

This is a Michael Dell "sell Apple and return the money to the investors" moment. Nintendo isn't the most profitable company in the world for a quarter and it's time to give up and start share cropping? Ridiculous.

You can go check. USPS has a long way to go before it comes close to the prices UPS and FedEx charge. It's like comparing coach to business class airline tickets for the vast majority of mail. The postal service is truly an amazing service for small parcels within the United States.