Great, so what HP needs to succeed is an inferior hardware product that costs twice or three times as much as the competition?

As much as people like to think that their own country can assemble and produce a better product, places like China and Taiwan are geared up to doing such work. The chips are made near by, the boards are made near by and there's plenty of people to do the work.

They ran their tests on a hackintosh from what I can see. They mention the OSX tests were not run on Apple hardware.

Now that probably doesn't make a huge difference, it just depends how good the hardware is and how they've make the hackintosh version of OSX.

Do they have any track record in enterprise software?

It seems like HP is just another tech firm looking for the next bandwagon. But ultimately they don't have the courage and conviction to stay on it until it gets where they want it to go.

This is hardly encouraging for customers who don't like their platform investment to be wiped out by scatter-brain CEOs.

We have both in the UK. The roundabouts work until the roads get to a certain level of traffic and then they put traffic lights on the roundabouts which are often full time lights. Nothing more irritating than stopping at traffic lights at 1am on empty roads.

Put more sensors and "intelligence" in the traffic lights and let people drive around as normal.

Traffic light systems are really stupid, last night I was driving home at 2am and came to some traffic lights, they changed to red and there was no other cars around.

I think you're getting running mixed up with Golf.

Wrong. Tablets were around for 10 years but they were without a touch screen friendly OS.

The iPad has a UI designed for the touchscreen. It is why you never really feel the need for a mouse or keyboard.

The reason the mouse and keyboard feel most comfortable when using Windows is because that is what Windows was designed for. Also, you tend to have the screen further away when using a PC or laptop and therefore touching the screen isn't ergonomically friendly.

Look at Microsoft under Ballmer, the creative spark has gone.

When Jobs left Apple in 1985 they bumbled along producing revisions of Macs and Mac OS that added very little. It took until 2001 and 4 years of Jobs to get a new OS with proper multitasking. OSX was based on all the work done at NeXT. Some of that work could have happened while he was at Apple and OSX (with a different name) could have been released in the 80s or 90s.

I bet he didn't see that it would be a popular embedded and server OS either.

Many seem to think Linux will grow on the desktop but that's unlikely to happen. It's easier to move into new markets.

Such long copyrights and brand names being traded around is pure laziness. The people buying brands and capitalising on IP created nearly 30 years ago.

Personally I see that there's a case for having all patents, copyright and other IP die with the company when they go bust. It offers an incentive to be creative and not take massive risks.

Drivers are more than just translating printer data into print outs. They have control panels for features in the printer. Multiple trays and the like.

Getting rid of printer drivers would mean having to handle these device specific features and even if you added facilities to handle these unique features there may be a situation that can't be handled.

I know someone who did 162 miles in one go, off road on a mountain bike. It was a 24-hour endurance event.

Pretty much everything on a bicycle is simpler, lighter and more efficient than a car. Although the lifespan of some of the parts can be lower, bearings, chain and so on.

But the biggest advantage is everything is user repairable given some knowledge. Unlike the increasingly complex car engines and ECUs.

Well, it was more that there was no resource tracking on the Amiga. So if an application crashed it would not then deallocate its memory. There was also no memory protection.

But this was down to the CPUs not having memory management units (MMU), even when you did have an MMU the OS wasn't written to use it. It would have required a rewrite of the kernel and applications.

Of course, an MMU was handy for debugging purposes.

Who funded the research?

It does often tend to skew the results in the favour of the person who commissioned the report.

We've looked at similar things in the UK.

Surely this system will track where you are and at what time you drive?

A fuel efficient car isn't efficient if it is sat idling in a traffic jam in the rush hour. Yet a car that is less fuel efficient will be emitting less pollution if it is driven at night on a clear road.

It's about trying to reduce traffic queues by making it more expensive to drive at peak times.