steveb

I see Amazon and B&N taking a big chunk out of the low-cost tablet market, and it will be hard for anyone else to compete.

They can sell direct to consumers and capture more revenue. They have a vested interest in locking customers into their ecosystem, so they can sell at cost. Finally, they are trusted brands and can use their online stores to promote product.

A company like HP and Samsung would make most of their profits on the sale of the device. $200 tablets will never be profitable on their own, so unless you have another revenue stream, it's not worth doing.

That leaves cheap clone systems probably running Android with crappy build quality and nonexistent engineering.

You can be sure that Amazon noticed the frenzy over $99 Touchpads and the strong sales of the Nook color.

HP gets about 5-6% operating margin on PCs: HP personal systems group: http://h30261.www3.hp.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=71087&p=irol-n... Personal Systems Group (PSG) revenue declined 3% year over year with a 5.9% operating margin.

Dell had $2.9 billion in consumer sales, $ 73 million profit: http://content.dell.com/us/en/corp/d/secure/fiscal12q2_relea...

Meanwhile, PC sales are declining in the U.S. and Europe. So it's a slow/negative growth market with small profits.

Virtually all of the (non-Apple) profit in the PC market accumulates to Microsoft and Intel. Windows costs around $50, that means that even if they could make a tablet as cheaply as Apple, they would still make significantly less profit.

And there is no evidence at all that anyone can compete with the iPad right now.

Apple's path of disruption continues. I hope they open source WebOS, but they will probably sell it for the patents based on what MMI got from Google.

I wish Nokia would have bought Palm.

Expect the PC market to be disrupted next by Apple with Macbook Airs sucking up all the profits, and iOS devices crimping unit growth. Who is going to stick their neck out to make single-digit margins on a Windows 8 tablet?

HP needs to open source WebOS. Make it the best touchscreen interface for Linux and build a community around it.

They don't really have any other options. They have low single-digit market share. There's not much money to be made selling a proprietary OS for $5-15 a copy. There is no way they can match the massive developer communities around Google/Apple/MS.

Mashable has renamed their account to be an individual (Pete Cashmore, the CEO).

"Mashable will be launching a new business profile and building it up from scratch once business accounts are available.

This account will continue to exist, but going forward it'll have my name and picture, and I'll continue to post here."

https://plus.google.com/101849747879612982297/posts

Based on U.S. market share, Android would be selling about 10 million a quarter in the U.S., so depending on growth they may or may not be the ones to displace Windows first.

In order to get to 15 million this quarter, Android would have to be outselling iPhone over 2 to 1 in the U.S. to make up for the iPad/iPod Touch.

Android will get a good boost if the rumored Amazon tablet comes out. It's just a matter of time.

iOS is about to displace Windows/DOS as the top selling OS in the U.S. A Microsoft OS has probably been the top seller for the last 30 years.

Just a rough back of the envelope calculation is 12-13 million iOS devices sold in the U.S. this quarter. (7 million iPhone, 3.5 iPad, 1.6 iPod Touch at 35% US/Global).

In comparison, 2Q11 non-Mac PC sales in the U.S. were about 16 million (and shrinking).

iPhone 5 on sprint/T-mobile and iPad 2 Christmas sales will give iOS a good chance to take the lead.

Very cool! I'd love to read how the PNG hack works.

To see if your browser supports webgl, go to http://webglreport.sourceforge.net/

On a pokey mac mini, I get a few frames per second and about 5-15% CPU use in Firefox and chrome

I wonder how much longer the big losses at Bing will be allowed to continue.

The Yearly growth in Google's revenue this quarter alone is almost equal to the entire annual revenue of Microsoft's online division.

Google is growing at 25-30+% while MS online grew 14% in the spring quarter.

And it costs MS about two dollars to generate a dollar of revenue online.

Link to the page: http://wheelsofsteel.net/

"The men realized they had a commodity. But no one would touch it: Mad Libs was too gamelike for book publishers and too booklike for game manufacturers. So in the late 1950s they published it themselves, storing the first printing — 14,000 copies — in the dining room of Mr. Price’s Manhattan apartment. He ate standing up for the next several months."

I'm getting in the habit of using git everywhere.

If I am going to make any changes to a config file, I just initialize a repo in that directory and make my changes. This is great to track what was done during outages when normal controls and processes are out the window.

I don't use rsync as much nowadays, as now I copy files around using git. It makes it easy to make sure two systems are in sync with one another.

If I want to compare directories A and B, often I will just create a repo in A and dump the contents of B on top of it.

And local clones and easy branches means it is easy to test crazy code and break source trees.

EDIT: One more thing, jgit is great for systems where you can't install git (like AIX, where it is a pain to get the packages). It's a single java jar that you can deploy to any system that has java http://eclipse.org/jgit/. I take the .sh script that wraps the .jar file and symlink it to a 'git'.

I kept thinking about the iPad as I watched the video. Nintendo sees opportunity in freeing users from the TV, Apple sees opportunity in freeing users from desktops.

Nintendo, being a game company, keeps the console as the focus, and has the controller as the accessory.

Apple, a device company, has the smarts in the controller, and AppleTV is the accessory.

Apple is trying to build a massive moat around their iOS/OSX ecosystem. If they can execute, it will be difficult for competitors to convert iOS users to other platforms.

  -Applications synced across multiple devices
  -music, photos, calendars, apps in iCloud (including your ripped content)
  -Integration with iTouch/iPad/iPhone docks and accessories
  -iMessage/Facetime lock in for user accounts
  -Gamecenter achievements
  -OSX integration and "feel" 
  -Reduce the need for a PC with wireless updates and sync (probably 75% of iOS users are on Windows)

The average user will have to face the prospect of changing out a lot of their software as they become more integrated into Apple's ecosystem.

Even with a minority share, Google has all the initiative in the browser market right now. They have forced their competitors to speed up development and support standards. Rapid releases, HTML 5 support and fast javascript engines benefit google as the overall web experience gets faster.

A secondary benefit for Google is that Microsoft is basically forced to commoditize their own platform APIs in order to stay relevant in the browser market.

How about Iridium? Over $5 billion invested, sold for $25 million.

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2000/03/35043

Right now it is hard to compete with bing.com, losing 2.5 billion per year.

The numbers are horrible, and Google is growing revenue almost twice as fast as Bing (27% YoY vs. 14%).

In the last quarter, Google growth in revenue from the same quarter last year was almost 3X Bing total revenues.

http://investor.google.com/financial/tables.html http://www.microsoft.com/investor/EarningsAndFinancials/Earn...

Totally not accurate, but if you assume a 40/7 ratio of iPad to iPad2 installed base and about 18 million original iPad's out there, you get over 3 million iPad 2 sales over the past two weeks.

The entire US PC industry (including Apple) is only about 6 million units/month, it took the original iPad 80 days to reach 3 Million in sales.

http://www.engadget.com/2011/01/14/idc-and-gartner-us-pc-sal...

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/06/22/apple_announce...

I am 41, and recently moved from management into a development role within the same company (a large Fortune 500 company).

I managed a team of UNIX SA's and was doing a decreasing amount of technical work over the past few years. I was trying to learn new technologies with a long-term goal of starting my own firm, but my coding skills were not improving fast enough as I didn't have time to hack at work or at home.

So I found another group within the same company that needed strong UNIX skills in a development role for an Grid application. I basically do whatever they need, whether it is making Windows MSI packages, tying systems together with python or working on the C++ codebase and feeling my head turn to mush.

Sometimes it feels like I do a Google search for every line of code I write, but I get a little better and faster every day. Last week I found myself porting some newer libraries back to python 2.4.

1997 was the year that Michael Dell gave the advice that Apple should close up shop and return the money to the shareholders.

As a company and brand, Apple was in bad shape: Windows 95 was a huge success and Windows NT was growing in the enterprise while NeXT had faltered.

Jobs really didn't have a lot in the product pipeline (the first iMac didn't come out until a year later), so the campaign needed to make employees and customers believe again in Apple.

Four years from this speech the iPod was released and OSX started to show up on desktops. It took eight years before Apple went to Intel processors.

And it took ten years of incremental improvement, discipline, product focus, and risk-taking before we got to the iPhone.

IMHO from a large-enterprise perspective:

1) A failure to execute. They were increasingly unable to compete in the high-end UNIX server market against IBM. The Rock processor was constantly delayed. Their machines fell behind in performance, Solaris was harder to manage and less stable than AIX.

2) Inability to capitalize on their inventions. IBM used Java as a common language across all of their enterprise platforms, they sold Websphere as a common application platform. NetApp was able to build a large business off NFS.

3) Linux/Intel got a lot better on the low end, Sun could not give a good reason why their platform was worth the additional cost. Usually when you are disrupted on the low end, you move upmarket, but due to 1) they were unable to take this path.

4) Muddled strategy: they dabbled in a lot of things-storage, office suites, mysql, etc. It was hard to tell if they loved or hated open source at times. They spent years battling Microsoft in the press. They had 2-3 different virtualization technologies. Some of the best Fake Steve Jobs posts are when he ripped into Sun.

5) Even if they were able to execute, their niche was becoming less viable. A mid-tier hardware manufacturer using a proprietary operating system is not a good position to be in. They did not have the deep enterprise roots and consulting business that IBM has, nor a massive install base like Linux or Windows.

It may run on Itanium, but it doesn't support more than a fraction of the x86 server functionality.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc772344(WS.10).a...

I don't see how Microsoft will ever shed the x86 legacy in Windows. Intel would have an interest in killing off arm-based laptops with aggressive pricing, and there really isn't any history of Windows developers rebuilding apps to support other chip architectures.

For a time you could buy U.S. savings bonds online with a credit card. So the common trick was:

1) Get a rewards credit card (Citi had at 5% rebate card at the time if you wanted cash, but there were also other rebate cards like frequent flier miles.) 2) Purchase bonds at treasurydirect.gov. (I bonds were a favorite at the time, the fixed rate was over 1%.)

The ability to buy savings bonds with a credit card was ended in 2003. http://www.treasurydirect.gov/news/faq/faq.htm

There are a lot of open issues with ssh keys, especially in an internal environment with a lot of end users. Is is difficult to control the distribution of keys or force a key password policy.

1) Users will copy their .ssh directories to every server they have access to so that they don't have to type in passwords. To deal with this:

  a. You can limit where public keys are stored with the AuthorizedKeysFile directive in sshd_conf. Force all keys to be controlled by root and in a central location. 

  b. Implement kerberos so that users don't need to use keys for single sign-on.

  c. only allow keys for functional ids (i.e. mysql), use IP filtering (from=xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx) on the public key to limit key access to a few administrative servers. 

  d. If NFS homedirs are exported to the world, any attacker can mount them and read off the keys from .ssh directories.

Other folks have mentioned brute-force attacks against your ssh daemons on the public internet. If possible, you should think about using a VPN/two-factor authentication to get access to your network or internal gateway servers.