This isn't the first time I've heard about Google hiring in waves (they came into Austin a number of years ago, hired a bunch of folks, then closed the office, forcing people to either move or quit, now their back again).

So what are all these people working on?
There's the search engine, of course. And Gmail. And a slate of other hanger on type apps that no one I know uses. Google Books? anyone?
I guess they need folks for Android? I'm assuming that's the case. Now that they have a licensable tangible product to develop and support there's always work to be done and bugs to fix. OS's take a lot of work.

That's kind of a weird comparison, though. Power7 cores have 4 hw threads. Nehalem has 2 'hyper' threads.

Like any tool, you pick the right one for the job. Nahalem is quite fast on a single thread, but if you have a web server processing boat loads of transactions/second, you may look towards a tool that is fast on many theads and can churn through many transactions concurrently.

They did *buy* the original Android. Are they hamstrung by the decisions that were made in that early version? It would just be good to know, I think.

Maybe they should change their moto from "Don't be evil" to "Don't be a dick".

That may be true, but that's what they said when those initial USB jailbreaks came out. That method juked the PS3 into going into debug mode. Maybe this joker found another way to do that?

I know only a minimal amount about Android, but why does Google insist on walking on the very edge of legality in regards to all of the software involved here? Licensing costs? That explains Java, but why all the incompatible custom changes, copyright header removals, and general open source shadiness.

They may be within that law, but are outside the bounds of being upstanding (apologize before hand for the term) 'FOSS netizens'.

Can they really not get Android to work *and* play nice?

Unfortunately, the quantity of apps is lacking, but as a fan of FOSS, you may be interested in how much WebOS has in common with other Linux distributions.
Kernel 2.6.14
glib, udev, lvm, WebKit, gStreamer, etc

Take a look here:
http://opensource.palm.com/1.4.5/index.html

If you install a terminal app and take a look around, it looks much like a standard Linux system. Often times Linux apps compiled for arm just work.

To answer you question: Freedom! Palm (now HP) have been encouraging people to hack/extend/play around with the system. It's a great little Linux system with a top notch interface(Luma). It's a shame that it's so ignored.

That being said, I have no idea what this "webOS on a PC" means. it may just be the Luma interface running on windows, which just sounds 'ick'.

Actually, the Palm Pre has a 'Home' button of sorts, they removed it for the Pre Plus. On both, you can still use the up swipe, or back gesture to get back 'home'.
I kind of prefer the home button myself, even though its a bit redundant.

ping www.apple.com
PING e3191.c.akamaiedge.net (184.84.45.15): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 184.84.45.15: CEASE AND DESIST. PING IS A TRADEMARKED NAME OWNED BY APPLE, INC.

Only the penitent company shall pass.

That show had religious metaphors about as subtle as a thong worn outside the pants.
That show had religious metaphors about as subtle as a Bella's hormones in Twilight.
That show had religious metaphors about as subtle as glow-in-the-dark condom.
That show had religious metaphors about as subtle as the politics in Chicago.
That show had religious metaphors about as subtle as the politics in Avatar.
That show had religious metaphors about as subtle as a vuvuzela horn.
That show had religious metaphors about as subtle as advertising during Saturday morning cartoons.

eh..sorry..got a bit carried away

More on topic: I'd probably pay for this if they expanded the shows/channels that they offered. Don't care so much about most of those shows.

True, but the original poster is correct that IBM integrated the CPU and GPU on the same die for them this time around, which is pretty nifty, I guess.
Same function and performance all around, but It helps MS save some money at ye old fabbe.

I've been saying the same thing about Apple over the last 6 years. It keeps proving me wrong and my Apple fan-boy friends always laugh at me.

It's a good thing I don't buy individual stocks, because I know as soon as I bought Apple it would tank.

I kind of think Larrabee was a hedge.

If you think about it, around the time it was announced (very early on in development, which is not normal), you had a bunch of potentially scary things going on in the market.
Cell came out with a potentially disruptive design, Nvidia was gaining ground in the HPC market, OpenCL was being brought forth by Apple to request a standard in hybrid computing.

All of sudden it looked like maybe Intel was a little too far behind.

Solution: Announce a new design of their own to crush the competition! In Intel-land, sometimes the announcement is as big as the GA. Heck, the announcement of Itanium was enough to kill off a few architectures. They would announce Larrabee as a discrete graphics chip to get gamers to subsidize development and....profit!

Lucky for them, Cell never found a big enough market and Nvidia had a few missteps of their own. Also, Nehalem turned out to be successful. Add all that up, and it becomes kind of clear that Larrebee was no longer needed, negating the fact that it was a huge failure, performance-wise.

Intel is the only company that can afford such huge hedge bets. Looks like maybe another one is coming to attack the ARM threat. We'll see.

I have SSH running on my Pre. If you get 'Preware' installed on you phone (some guides over at precentral.net), use that to install the console and command line utilities. An SSH client is included in that.

(I can even use a VPN app to tunnel into my work network to check on some machines if need be :)