Category: General Tech
Billions
HP just reported its Q4 2011 financial results, and although the company managed an overall profit, the real news is in the webOS numbers: HP spent a big chunk of $3.3 billion this year killing the webOS group and absorbing Palm’s falling value. Considering the $1.2 billion HP spent on Palm in the first place, and it’s clear that HP’s blown through at least a couple billion in its failed webOS experiment — an experiment that’s still awaiting a final resolution from new CEO Meg Whitman, who’s promised employees a decision on their fates sometime within the next few weeks.
Fact-Checking on ‘House’
Wired has a nice look behind-the-scenes of one of my favorite shows on TV.
Arrested Development on Netflix
Ultrabooks Are The New Netbooks
This Is My Confession
I owned three netbooks back in the day. The first was the original netbook, the Eee PC 701 4G. While the “4G” had nothing to do with its network connection, the machine wasn’t half bad.
It was all the way bad.
I later moved on to the HP Mini 1000 and then the Dell Mini 9. The HP had a fairly decent keyboard, and the Dell Mini 9 ran OS X 10.5 Leopard like a champ.
The Salvation Army to Test Square Payments for Red Kettle Workers
Marco, on the Kindle Fire
Ouch:
I expected the Kindle Fire to be good for books, great for magazines and newspapers, great for video, and good for apps and games.
In practice, it’s none of these. Granted, I’ve only spent two days with it, so I can’t share any long-term impressions. But I’m honestly unlikely to have any, because this isn’t a device that makes me want to use it more. And that’s fatal.
HP Envy
What a great design. Pathetic.
Romanians Love Hacking NASA
Protect the Internet
As written, they would betray more than a decade of US policy and advocacy of Internet freedom by establishing a censorship system using the same domain blacklisting technologies pioneered by China and Iran.
Mike Chambers, Flash and Adobe PR
The other day, I linked to a blog post by Adobe’s Mike Chambers, in which he let loose concerning the company’s recent announcement about killing off mobile Flash.
I’ve been thinking about Chambers’ blog post all weekend for several reasons.
After listing off his history with Flash, Chambers re-caps the company’s announcements. After that, he writes:
It is this last point which received the most attention, caused the most confusion, and essentially overshadowed all of the other information. Given the very public recent history of the Flash Player on devices this was understandable. However, it is clear that we did not do a good job of communicating why we are are making this shift in strategy. I know how frustrating this has been for the Flash community, and for that I want to apologize. Our goal was to be very clear about WHAT we were doing, but in doing so, we didn’t pay enough attention to explaining WHY we were doing it.
Adobe to Cease Work on Mobile Flash
Adobe is all about enabling designers and developers to create the most expressive content possible, regardless of platform or technology. For more than a decade, Flash has enabled the richest content to be created and deployed on the web by reaching beyond what browsers could do. It has repeatedly served as a blueprint for standardizing new technologies in HTML. Over the past two years, we’ve delivered Flash Player for mobile browsers and brought the full expressiveness of the web to many mobile devices.