Comcast Finally Comes Through
I take back every bad thing that I’ve ever said about Comcast / Xfinity. The tech came out today, finally cleaned up everything with the cable running up to the house and fixed problems caused by previous techs over the past 6 years. Dustin, you’re the man!
Not that it really matters to me, but he was on time. What does matter to me was that Dustin finally fixed issues that I’ve pointed out to other techs, but that they were unwilling to address. He worked very fast and knew exactly what he was doing.
Here are the results:
This Explains a Lot About HP’s Current State
Jean-Louis Gassée has a great analysis of the recent HP news. What particularly caught my attention, though, was this bit:
… this is what Léo said during the Q&A part of Thursday’s conference call:
“Let me try to answer this and we’ll try to answer this as a team. So what the board and the management team have been working very diligently over the last period is to really look at all of our options and what the board has decided to do, together with the management team, is to look at all of the strategic options around PSG. And we’re really examining all of them. The announcement of today will allow us to look at this much more closely, including all of the synergies and other aspects of this operation. And over time, a decision will or will not crystallize on what the most appropriate way is to deal with PSG going forward. That’s all I can say about this right now, and we will refrain from commenting on what the strategic options are until the board will make such a decision.”
What? This kind of BS is exactly what is wrong with both business and politics right now. This guy is supposed to be leading one of the most storied technology companies in the world. He certainly has the authority to give an honest and direct response. He could even just say, “No comment.” Instead, he throws up a crap shield to obfuscate any possible real information. The worst part is that he’s probably proud of that absolutely horrible answer. I’m sure that his lackeys are telling him how clever it was. An answer like that should be grounds for immediate termination, with cause.
This is a sure sign that we’ve simply gotten to “clever” for our own good. This kind of arrogant refusal to “answer the question” is killing our businesses and our political system. It makes me furious, then it makes me sad.
Longtop Delisted
Following up on my last post, Longtop has apparently been delisted by the NYSE. Good riddance. Let’s try to be a little less greedy, and a little more careful with our investments in the future.
Longtop’s chairman, Jia Xiao Gong, told a Deloitte partner that there was “fake cash recorded on the books” because there had been “fake revenue in the past.”
NY Times, “The Audacity of Chinese Frauds” Published: May 26, 2011
While I’ve been carefully following the sad tale of Longtop Financial Technologies, I’ve been reluctant to write about the situation. You see, many of the wounds from my battles with the China outsourcing business have yet to heal (also some of the companies actually still owe me money). Finally, however, I just couldn’t resist anymore. This post on the WSJ finally prompted me to say something.
On Sunday, the company’s auditor resigned, and the SEC has started looking into its books.
The problem is, and I say this from the perspective of having spent several years dealing with organizations much like Longtop, western investors have absolutely no way of knowing enough about the internals of, and prospects for, these businesses to make rational investment decisions. This isn’t even gambling. It’s just another scam.
Given that you can’t possibly have the faintest idea about what is really going on at these companies, I’ll restate my central point: “Only greedy fools invest in companies like this.”
So, ARM is Apple’s Love Child?
I guess that this bit of semiconductor industry history completely escaped me. According to a story in the Wall Street Journal:
“In 1990, Apple wanted a chip for its new personal digital assistant, the Newton. It formed a joint venture with Acorn that was later renamed ARM Holdings. Apple threw in $1.5 million, according to Mr. Hauser. Acorn contributed its 12-person chip design team.
Befitting a tech start-up, ARM’s first headquarters near Cambridge, England, was a converted turkey barn. Acorn eventually died, but ARM prospered. Apple made $800 million on its investment.”
Wow, good move, Apple!
According to the story on TechCrunch, the following is attributed to Marissa Mayer, Google’s VP, Search Products & User Experience.
Mayer, for her part, was even less forthcoming. In an off the record phone conversation she said “Screw the webspam team,” and “It’s not like people are going to start using Bing.”
That must really be a fun place to work… Perhaps the execs at Google need to decide what they want the company to be when it grows up. Personally, I side with Mr. Cutts.
i.MX6Quad and i.MX6Dual will appear first, fabricated (at least initially) on a common sliver of silicon with two of the four CPU cores disabled on the latter devices.
OK, it’s cool enough that Freescale is adding to the pile of quad core ARM offerings, but I’m struck by the apparent fact that it is most efficient for them to derive the dual-core product by simply disabling two of the cores in the quad-core die. Fascinating. We used to really worry about making the best possible use of the available area. Not any more, I guess.
The Sound of Music
… is on TV. Now that is a classic movie. I’d like to watch, but I probably should go work on my image picker code, or my lame efforts to render a torus…
Happy Thanksgiving!
In honor of the season, I feel compelled to list some of the things that I’m thankful for (in no particular order):
- Mobile Data - Everything, Everywhere. Geek Nirvana
- Cheap RAM - More is always better
- Multicore processors - Ditto, up to a point
- Solid State Storage - Need for speed
- Cloud Storage
- iOS
- Xcode
- Android (but not Eclipse and not Java)
- Sushi Maru in San Jose - The best sushi in Silicon Valley
- Genki Sushi - The best sushi value, anywhere
- Australia - It’s a long story
- Firefox
- Objective-C
- Python
- C
- Twitter
- Google
- Big post-CRT Monitors
- CNBC
- The New Otani -My favorite hotel in the world
Trapeze Networks Finds a Real Home at Juniper
In a long ago, far away universe, I sold offshore outsourcing services to Trapeze Networks. I sincerely apologize to them for that offense. Anyway, I grew to have tremendous respect for the engineering talent at Trapeze. Thus, I was extremely dismayed when I heard that the company had been sold to Belden for US$133M.
Over the past couple of years, some of my friends got fed up and moved on, but a number stuck it out (something about the beautiful Pleasanton location?). For those that stayed, I’m so glad to hear that they, once again, have a home in a real technology company.
It appears that Juniper Networks was able to rescue Trapeze for just US$152M. I guess that Belden didn’t build much value over the 2+ years that it owned Trapeze.
My heartfelt congratulations to my old friends at Trapeze, and I really do sincerely apologize for the offshore thing - my bad.
Operating systems don’t age well. Some have better genes than others or they have more competent caretakers, but sooner or later they are stricken by a cancer
Mr. Gassée suggests that Apple may be in a position to (once again) chuck compatibility in favor of an OS restart.
He also explores something that I’ve been wondering about - with all of the uP assets Apple is assembling, how long will Macs have “Intel Inside?” The prospects of a 4+ core ARM based “AX” chip are just too compelling to dismiss. Apple does have precedent for dumping an architecture when it suits them - users with old hardware and apps be damned…
Hey Google: Your implementation of Android Tasks is Just STUPID
I give up. I’ve tried posting on their support forums, I’ve tried to muddle through, but Google’s current implementation of tasks on Android is just hopelessly brain dead.
What kind of idiot designer thinks that it’s useful for tasks to be displayed ONLY in the reverse order of the item’s create date? We can’t sort by date due, which is the only thing that makes sense for practical use.
Come on Google, you should be ashamed of this limitation. At least in the desktop browser we have the option to sort by due date. PLEASE give us the same in the mobile version.
Come on, just one little tweak - sort task lists by due date - will make all of the difference in the world. PRETTY PLEASE!!!
Two of the apps that I have set to auto-update (Twitter and Google Search) did so this morning. Unfortunately, when I looked at both the Manage Applications and the Market/Downloads page several hours later, both apps still showed that they were “Installing.” Uninstalling the apps didn’t solve the problem. Neither did power cycling the phone. Finally, I turned to the Android Forums, and found this great tip:
“Happens to me every once in a while. Click on the download and cancel it. Try reinstalling. If that doesn’t work, try
Menu > settings > applications > manage applications > All
Choose Market…. clear data and cache, and then try to reinstall the offending app.”
Many thanks to Tim K. for the solution
I am sincerely hoping that this is all just a hoax. I would be severely disappointed to find out that the law enforcement professionals charged with guarding our national security were really just “Keystone Kops”.
“… the device was an older model of tracking equipment that had long ago been replaced by devices that don’t require batteries. Batteries die and need to be replaced if surveillance is ongoing so newer devices are placed in the engine compartment and hardwired to the car’s battery so they don’t run out of juice. He was surprised this one was so easily found.”
There’s even the obligatory “bad cop” routine:
“… through the course of her comments indicated she knew what restaurants he and his girlfriend frequented. She also congratulated him on his new job. Afifi recently got laid off from his job, but on the same day was hired as an international sales manager of laptops and computers for Cal Micro in San Jose.
The agents also knew he was planning a short business trip to Dubai in a few weeks.”
Read More:
I’m just shaking my head.
