Linked by David Adams on Wed 17th Aug 2011 17:46 UTC
Ars Technica is reporting that US Retailer Best Buy has been able to sell less than 10% of the TouchPad tablets that it ordered from HP, and now wants HP to take them back. Similarly, deal-a-day site Woot offered TouchPads at a very aggressive price, and only managed to sell 612 of them. This is for a site that often sells out goofy tech widgets in hours. When the TouchPad was gearing up for release, there seemed to be a fair amount of interest among geeks. Is it just that it hasn't resonated the same way with the general public, or have people just been disappointed once they've put their hands on one?
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Member since:2005-09-21
That was part of my point up above -- when I can get a 1.6ghz Atom powered 10.1" netbook with a 250 gig hard drive and a gig of RAM for $250, what the devil is making these crappy little 1.2ghz ARM powered devices with the same RAM (or sometime half) and a crappy little 16 gig SSD (a $50 part if that) come in at $400?!? I can aftermarket mod a netbook to have a touchscreen, twice as big a SSD and flip the panel around and STILL come out under-price.
Uh.. 10 hour battery life vs 2. Capacitative touch screen. Thinner, lighter. 2 cameras. Way better graphics chips than in that POS netbook.
The market has shown the iPad isn't really overpriced. If it was, we'd have a dozen Android tablets with the same specs for cheaper right now.
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/20/13 21:50 UTC
PocketNow interviews Marc Dillon, and there's an interesting note about why Jolla is keeping the display properties under wraps: "We're leaving some of those details out because we do understand that there are a lot of really big players in the market and they tend to take certain components in the market and dominate them. We created the ability to actually be able to run Sailfish on multiple hardware displays and be able to swap components, so this is part of the demand and supply planning phase. We are committed to this industrial design which is a 4.5-inch display, an 8 megapixel camera on the back and a front-facing camera at the front, and the exact specs of the display we'll provide when we're close to delivery." Something you rarely hear anything about.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/19/13 23:15 UTC
"This is my NeXTstation Turbo Color booting the Mac System 7.1 Operating System using a hardware add-on called 'Daydream'. The Daydream has a Mac ROM and a few custom ICs in it and hooked up to the NeXTs DSP port. Turns your NeXT into a full fledged 68k powered Mac." So cool.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/19/13 23:11 UTC, submitted by Drumhellar
"The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 6.1, the first feature update of the NetBSD 6 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons, as well as new features and enhancements. Please note that all fixes in the prior security/bugfix updates (NetBSD 6.0.1 and 6.0.2) are also in 6.1."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 21:06 UTC
"At the end of a week in which Electronic Arts confirmed it wasn't developing a thing for the Wii U, one of the software engineers in EA Sports' Canada studio, in a series of since-deleted tweets, disparaged the console as 'crap' and suggested Nintendo should give up on hardware altogether. 'The Wii U is crap. Less powerful than an Xbox 360. Poor online/store. Weird tablet', tweeted Bob Summerwill, listed as a senior software engineer at EA Canada, in a reply to a tweet posting a link about EA's no-Wii U news. 'Nintendo are walking dead at this point'." The Wii U is turning into the 21st century's Virtual Boy.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 7:37 UTC
"In NixOS, the entire operating system - the kernel, applications, system packages, configuration files, and so on - is built by the Nix package manager from a description in a purely functional build language. The fact that it's purely functional essentially means that building a new configuration cannot overwrite previous configurations. Most of the other features follow from this." Interesting approach. A Linux distribution, sure, but with some very refreshing ideas about system configuration.
Linked by fran on 05/18/13 1:38 UTC
Appfour added, among other features, C/C++ support to its new version of AIDE. From Android-IDE, "Now you can write parts of your app or your whole app in C/C++ on your device. AIDE supports the Standard Android NDK toolchain (GCC 4.6 + Bionic, STL, ...). No changes are necessary if you want to build an app developed on a PC with Eclipse. C/C++ development is fully integrated: Build errors appear in the error list and files can easily be navigated to with Go to file. The editor supports C/C++ syntax highlighting."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/17/13 23:35 UTC, submitted by kragil
Ars nails it: "The answer is that Google did announce what amounts to a fairly substantial Android update yesterday. They simply did it without adding to the update fragmentation problems that continue to plague the platform. By focusing on these changes and not the apparently-waiting-in-the-wings update to the core software, Google is showing us one of the ways in which it's trying to fix the update problem."
Linked by MOS6510 on 05/17/13 22:22 UTC
"It is good for programmers to understand what goes on inside a processor. The CPU is at the heart of our career. What goes on inside the CPU? How long does it take for one instruction to run? What does it mean when a new CPU has a 12-stage pipeline, or 18-stage pipeline, or even a 'deep' 31-stage pipeline? Programs generally treat the CPU as a black box. Instructions go into the box in order, instructions come out of the box in order, and some processing magic happens inside. As a programmer, it is useful to learn what happens inside the box. This is especially true if you will be working on tasks like program optimization. If you don't know what is going on inside the CPU, how can you optimize for it? This article is about what goes on inside the x86 processor's deep pipeline."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/17/13 22:15 UTC, submitted by Tom
"It was the only moment I heard regret slip into Otellini's voice during the several hours of conversations I had with him. 'The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I've ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut,' he said. 'My gut told me to say yes.'" The world would've been a much different place - Apple would have been less dependant on Samsung for its chips, which probably would've meant less money for Samsung to develop its Galaxy business.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/16/13 21:41 UTC
Glass is getting some love at Google I/O as well. New applications have been released - Facebook, Twitter, Evernote, Elle, Tumblr, and CNN. Perhaps more interesting: the newly announced Google Glass Developer Kit will allow offline applications and direct hardware access - great for hacking and expanding Glass' potential. This kit will really allow hackers to put Glass through its paces.More News »
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Member since:
2005-07-12
That was part of my point up above -- when I can get a 1.6ghz Atom powered 10.1" netbook with a 250 gig hard drive and a gig of RAM for $250, what the devil is making these crappy little 1.2ghz ARM powered devices with the same RAM (or sometime half) and a crappy little 16 gig SSD (a $50 part if that) come in at $400?!? I can aftermarket mod a netbook to have a touchscreen, twice as big a SSD and flip the panel around and STILL come out under-price.
Not that I would -- I like having the screen propped up by the bottom half of a laptop when lying down so I can use my trackball with it without the hassle of reaching over to the screen. That's what I really don't get -- it's a much more inconvenient form factor (for me at least), and no keyboard just makes it a toy. MAYBE if they build one with two displays that hinged in the middle so you could hold it like a book in the crook of your thumb. I tried out the apple one and these oven mitts I have for hands can't even hold onto the bugger... Probably why I'm not a big fan of todays phones either. Stuff's getting so small it's like it's designed for a five year old -- and someone who's only 5'4" tall should NOT have to be saying that.
Type of thing that in a year or two should end up in the sock drawer next to the AMD Geode powered thin client, the Atari Portfolio, and that Altoids Mint tin from 1984.
Edited 2011-08-18 03:11 UTC