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Posts tagged as “hp”

Apple Patents Gestures, Secure Boot Is Here, Android Bests iPhone

Friday FOSS Week in Review

It’s been a busy week. So busy, in fact, I was unable to make my deadline for FWIR, so here I am with a special Saturday edition. Just so you know, there’s a precedent for this. Back in the days when ABC ran “Monday Night Football” they called any NFL game they ran “Monday Night Football,” no matter what the day of the week. Hence, we were often treated to “Monday Night Football, Special Thursday Edition” and such. In that spirit, I offer you “Friday FOSS Week in Review, Special Saturday Edition.”

Of course, if I’m going to get busy and miss deadline, it’ll happen on a busy week in FOSS news. The fates work that way, I’m convinced. Indeed, after a couple of ho-hum weeks, the news flew fast and furious this week. Hold on, it’ll be a hell of a ride!

More Apps Downloaded to Android than to iPhone

It was reported on Tuesday that ABI Research says Android now leads the pack in the number of apps downloaded. According to their figures, 44% of all mobile apps downloaded are headed for Android devices, with 31% going to the iOS platform. These figures are miles away from what the research firm predicted back in 2009 as the mobile wars were just getting heated up:

The Death of Zune, the Resurrection of WebOS & Kernel.org Returns

Friday FOSS Week in Review

It was already a slow week when the news came on Wednesday of Steve Jobs’ demise. Since then, most tech sites have been reporting on not much else. As always, however, there were a few things to note…

Privacy Issues with Kindle Fire’s Silk Browser

Almost as soon as Amazon unveiled their new Kindle Fire tablet last Wednesday, Naked Security raised some privacy concerns about the device’s browser, called Silk. It seems the browser, in order to offer a quicker user experience, does most of it’s heavy lifting in the cloud:

Christine Hall

Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux

HP Board Misses One Shot Opportunity

HP’s Board of Directors could’ve solved a lot of their problems with the single action of replacing failed CEO Léo Apotheker with a competent executive capable of managing a diversified (some would say bloated) giant like HP. The CEO job would not be a position to fill with haste, which the board seems to have done.

HP Welcome Sign outside corporate headquarters.Sure, Meg Whitman is something of a minor CEO rock star insofar as her name has a brand recognition. That brand is connected to her performance leading eBay to über success and to a failed bid to become California’s governor. As has been pointed-out countless times since Thursday, when when she was hired as HP’s latest CEO, however, eBay is not a technology company but is an auction house that happens to reside in cyberspace. As for her venture into West Coast politics – does blowing $144 million of her own money (and an additional $34 million of other people’s money) in a failed election bid instill confidence in her ability to make sound decisions?

Christine Hall

Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux

Phone 7 FUD, Windows 8 Lockout, Samsung Takes Off Gloves

Friday FOSS Week in Review

This week’s biggest story in FOSS was the quick changing of the guard over at HP. Although HP isn’t really a FOSS company, they do of course sell Linux servers and were recently considered to be on the verge of becoming a major FOSS player with their webOS. There’s no need to cover any of that here, however, as I posted my viewpoints on this fiasco last night.

DigiNotar Put out of Business by Hackers

You know, when you’re a security firm it pays to have your security in place. I mean, it doesn’t look even a little good when you’re hacked, especially when your business is telling other people how not to get hacked. This is a truth that became much more self evident early this week when Dutch security firm DigiNotar announced they were going into voluntary bankrupcy and putting themselves out of business as the end result of a hacking incident that began last July. It seems that attackers gained access to the firm’s internal systems and issued a slew of fake certificates that allowed the hacker/crackers to impersonate web firms like Google, Facebook, Twitter and Skype. Evidently, the certificates were used to gain access to over 30,000 Google email accounts.

Christine Hall

Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux

No Brass Ring on HP’s CEO Carousel

Since September 18th I’ve been saying that Hewlett-Packard needed to get rid of Léo Apotheker sooner rather than later. Well, the deed’s been done and Apotheker’s been shown the door. The trouble is, HP’s board doesn’t seem to have learned their lesson. They’re replacing him with former eBay CEO and would be California governor Meg Whitman, who might even be less qualified than Apotheker to run the ailing tech giant. The announcement of the switch came early this evening, pretty much timed to coincide with the closing of the stock market.

Apotheker’s Troubled Tenure

Léo Apotheker
It wasn’t obvious that Léo Apotheker was a good choice to replace Mark Hurd in the catbird seat at HP last September when it happened, and it has never been obvious since. In fact, it’s never even been obvious that Mr. Hurd’s resignation should’ve been forced to begin with, as the cloud over his head, a charge of sexual harassment, was evidently short on substance. HP’s board, evidently after blood, ignored the fact the he’d put the company on a sound financial footing and had charted a reasonable course for the company to follow, a course that left room for expansion into other areas.

None of this mattered, according to James B.Steward writing in The New York Times, for the bigwigs at HP thought the company to big to fail:

Christine Hall

Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux

Tech Firms Facing the Abyss

There seems to be quite a few tech companies in trouble these days. In fact, in an article published yesterday on 24/7 Wall Street, tech firms represent six out of the eight major companies listed as being in troubled financial waters. There aren’t any surprises here for anyone who’s been paying attention, but a year or so ago most of us wouldn’t have suspected that some of these companies would even be capable of falling on hard times.

Topping this list is Best Buy. Although we’ve known for some time that the company is ailing, this is still something of a surprise given the recent history of consumer electronics retailing. After all, it was only a couple of years ago that Best Buy’s main competitor, Circuit City, floated to the surface face down, killed by intense competition from…you guessed it, Best Buy. For the latest quarter, the chain’s net income dropped $77 million from the same quarter last year, from $254 million to $177 million.

Christine Hall

Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux

More Linux Site Hacks, ReactOS Ready to Go, Obama Signs ‘America Invents Act’

Friday FOSS Week in Review

In many ways, FOSS news this week is like a soap opera with lots of stories being continuations from last week’s items. However, there is some new stuff to report. If you’re like me, all FOSS news is interesting….

Bartz Resigns from Yahoo Board

After being fired by telephone last Tuesday, Yahoo’s former CEO Carol Bartz resigned from the Internet company’s board on Friday. According to a Reuters report posted on Yahoo, the resignation was made public on Sunday and first reported by The Wall Street Journal:

Christine Hall

Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux

Intel Still MeeGos, Apple Loses Again, Yahoo Presents ‘The Charlie Sheen Show’

Friday FOSS Week in Review

What a wacky week for tech news this has been! I couldn’t make much of this stuff up if I tried – and if I did, you wouldn’t believe it. That’s one of the nice things about the Internet, I can provide you with links so you can see for yourself that these stories really happened…

Apple Loses Another iPhone Prototype in Bar

Less than a year and a half after an Apple employee lost a top secret prototype of an iPhone 4 in a bar, it’s happened again. This time the prototype of an iPhone 5 was lost at Cava 22, a bar located in San Francisco’s mission district. Although every tech site on the planet is covering this story, I think it’s only fitting to turn to Gizmodo for a quote, given their connection with the first lost prototype:

Christine Hall

Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux

Kernel Archives Hacked, SCO Dies Again, More HP Changes & More

Friday FOSS Week in Review

It’s been a busy week in the FOSS world. Evidently everyone’s been in a hurry to make some news happen before leaving town for the Labor Day weekend. Well, lots of FOSS news is good for me, makes my job easy, so here goes…

HP Makes PR Changes After WebOS/PC Fiasco

I’ve been working on a story all week on the mess at HP caused by the all-at-once and probably premature announcement they’re dropping WebOS, smartphones and consumer PCs. One trouble, I keep having to go back and rewrite stuff, because the story is still very, very fluid and new aspects keep popping up almost daily.

On Monday, Bloomberg Businessweek announced that HP’s chief communications officer, Bill Wohl, will be moving to a “special assignment.” Chief Marketing Officer Marty Homlish will be picking up the slack with the corporate communications team and Lynn Anderson will take care of PR’s day-to-day operations, at least for the time being. According to the Bloomberg, both Wohl and Homlish have a history with CEO Leo Apotheker that predates his tenure at HP:

Christine Hall

Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux

Top 10 Announcements to Expect from HP CEO Leo Apotheker

It’s Thursday – time for another Top 10 list.

When we came up with the idea for this weekly tongue-in-cheek look at the tech world, we were afraid we’d have trouble keeping to topical subjects. Well, that hasn’t been a problem this week, as the movers and shakers of the tech world have given us enough ammunition to keep the Top 10 list going for months to come. However, one incident seemed to be particularly appropriate for us to put in the sites of our humor guns, and that was HP CEO Leo Apotheker’s wacky announcement last week that he was throwing out the baby with the wash to rebuild HP in IBM’s image, acting under the old adage that the best way to separate yourself from the crowd is to be like someone else.

This move was so brazenly weird that we decided we’re going to hear even more wild and crazy announcements from HP in the near future, so we put our brains into overtime figuring out what we might expect. Here it is, the top 10 announcements to expect from HP CEO Leo Apotheker…

  1. “Now that we’re getting out of the consumer computer business, we’re going to be offering our remaining stock of desktops for $99 at Best Buy.”
  2. “We’re now pursuing licensing WebOS to be used to power kitchen timers.”
  3. “HP is aggressively seeking more companies to purchase for too much money and then shut down without monetizing their assets in any way.”
  4. “HP will be suing Red Hat, SUSE and Ubuntu because we just discovered WebOS code in the Linux kernel.”
  5. Holy cow! I was just informed that we’re the largest vendor of PCs in the world. I had no idea. If I’d known, I’d never would’ve abandoned our computer line. What was I thinking?”

IBM Backs OOo, Evil Empire in Decline & Apple Bakes Patent Pie

Friday FOSS Week in Review

Lots of interesting news this week as we reboot Friday FOSS Week in Review – so let’s get going.

IBM Lines-up Behind OpenOffice.org

Is it really a news story that IBM has decided to support OpenOffice.org? Considering the fact that Oracle’s move to push the project over to Apache was at Big Blue’s prodding, I’d say not. Still, at least now the players are clearly defined. In addition to lending moral support and giving Larry Ellison a shoulder to cry on, IBM is also donating the code from IBM Lotus Symphony.

Christine Hall

Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux

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