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Gerson W. Barbosa · (This post was last modified: 10-07-2014 01:00 PM by Gerson W. Barbosa.)

http://recode.net/2014/10/06/its-officia...it-in-two/

Steve Simpkin · 10-07-2014, 02:15 PM

See also:
http://www.hpmuseum.org/forum/thread-2236.html

Gerson W. Barbosa · 10-07-2014, 03:06 PM

(10-07-2014 02:15 PM)Steve Simpkin Wrote: See also:
http://www.hpmuseum.org/forum/thread-2236.html

Before posting I took a quick glance at the threads, but I skipped that one. I should have use browse "Find" function which indeed returns two occurrences of "split". Anyway, this is a confirmation, but it should be post there instead of a new thread.
Sorry for my lack of attention!

Gerson.

robert rozee · (This post was last modified: 10-08-2014 12:01 AM by robert rozee.)

perhaps it is fate suggesting that the discussion should be split in two!

rob :-)

cutterjohn · (This post was last modified: 10-08-2014 03:16 AM by cutterjohn.)

I'm kinda thinking that this is the source of Tim's latest(well several hours ago) reply in the Prime forum which sounded like a hollow BS reply to me...

I'm thinking that the post that seemed to have instigated that post was probably correct, the calculator division(such as it is) will be the first(or one of the first) casualties... (given their halfassedness, lack of support, lack of marketing, etc.)

[EDIT]
http://www.hpmuseum.org/forum/thread-936...l#pid19959
[/EDIT]

Gerson W. Barbosa · 10-08-2014, 05:43 AM

My local source this morning mentioned an estimated 55,000 lay-off in the next years. But it also informed that the company was founded in 1939 by Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, two Stanford students, and started as... a calculator maker! :-)

RMollov · (This post was last modified: 10-08-2014 09:42 AM by RMollov.)

Calculators are something from the past.

Sad, but true.

Chris Pem10 · (This post was last modified: 10-09-2014 04:25 PM by Chris Pem10.)

The war for your palm is over... and HP lost. Samsung, LG, Google and Apple all won the rights to grace your five fingers with pixels. And they worked really, really hard to win. And they deserve it.

And why would anyone make a single-use handheld these days? We've got $100 android tablets and Mathematica-in-a-browser with cloud storage. It is still kind of expensive... but this will come down. Heck, you can have Mathematica for free on the Raspberry Pi. The most powerful computer algebra system on the planet, with 20 years of maturity; for free, on $35 hardware. I love calcs too... but keeping their heads burried in the sand for too long killed HP.

Wolfram knows the PC market is dying... so they innovate !

Lead, follow, or get out of the way.

Chris Pem10 · 10-09-2014, 05:31 PM

Remember.... this is the same HP that purchased the Palm OS for $1,000,000,000 a few years ago.

One billion dollars for a dead OS. And android was just sitting there, waiting for adoption.

Assuming a US-based engineer costs HP ~ $200,000 per year, they threw away 5,000 engineering man-YEARS buying that OS !

Let's just assume engineers in foreign countries are 1/3 the cost... I wonder what HP could have accomplisted with 15,000 engineering man-years?

Answer: fire them all and burp out another POS inkjet that uses $5000/gallon ink.

lmmt61 · 10-10-2014, 07:50 AM

I am not sure about using small tablets or smart phones for that purpose. It is VERY unconfortable to use any maths program with the soft-keyboard. If the tablet is big enough then it is easier but then again, is BIG and a trouble to move with it.
And finally the bettery life is 10 hours if you are lucky; the charger is a must.
On the other side I agree that new generations like tactile screens and to have whatsapp, facebook and the calculator in the same machine; if the Prime could deal with all that at the same time would have been excellent. I guess!

Chris Pem10 · 10-10-2014, 02:44 PM

Think about how nice mathematical expressions would look on a tablet; it would be LaTex at 200 dpi.

As for buttons; yes I love the tactile feel of the buttons too. But printing 3 abbreviated function names on or around a 1 cm^2 physical key is very limiting. How about dynamicly changing buttons that morph to match the type of problems you're solving? Doing some diff eq... the pallete of buttons is updated to every function relating to that area of math. No more left or right shifting before getting the function you want. No more menus filled with cryptic, abbreviated function names. With 200 dpi and custom-sized buttons, you could print function names in their entirety. No more "lapl" when the button could say "LaplaceTransform[f(t), t, s]"

It will happen someday. I think Wolfram could do it now as they have all the pieces of tech ready: MMa runs on arm processors, you can make custom buttons in the interface, etc. But I couldn't imagine why they'd ever produce a custom handheld to do so when everyone already owns a capable tablet/phone. Who want's the expense and headache of supporting a device when all you need to support is the software.