This is just the kind of price fixing that antitrust law was supposed to prevent. Did DOJ's antitrust division get adequate funding?

HP is a zombie company. They're dead, but not gone.

The whirring noise in the background are Bill and Dave spinning in their graves. I don't know how once great companies get this stupid, but we need to figure this out and stop it by whatever means necessary. They wouldn't update the drivers for their low-end laser printers to Windows 10, and burned us on a laptop warranty repair. We responded by steering several million in server orders to Dell instead of HP. We pretty much stopped buying anything HP after that too.

Somewhere along the way, management stops working for the customer. When that happens, the company is doomed, Personally, I blame bad senior management and board of directors. But, there's probably more to it than that.

This is just downright disrespectful. I admin a site with a model car forum. We get this problem for a long time. Every month or so, we identify IP addresses taking way too much bandwidth and block them if they don't end up being a search engine. There have been multiple entities, and they keep scraping the same stuff. I'm not upgrading my server to support their projects.

These are the actions of a company where pleasing your manager has become more important than pleasing the customer.

We blacklisted HP after they burned us on a warranty repair for a laptop. Then they bricked one of our existing laser printers because they were too lazy to update the driver for Windows 10. That literally cost them millions in server sales.

It will continue for a while, but this company is dead dead dead. The whirring noise in the background are Bill and Dave spinning in their graves.

Our Sun workstations were functional (enough) and reliable. I don't think they'd pass muster today, but boy were they solid. We rebooted ours once a year whether they needed it or not. (Windows Server admin heads explode right about here)

I remember this getting talked about in the early '80s, and there was substantial evidence of exactly what this study confirmed. It took 40 years to acknowledge what we knew then strictly because of some stupid dogma. When I think of how many combat troops we could have helped, and how many we lost post combat to PTSD, it makes me nauseous.

This has huge consequences for Amazon. It takes them 30 minutes to get their employees through screening. They don't pay them for that. Now they'll have to. Apple could stick it to Bezos by not appealing the ruling if they wanted to.

The basic idea is that revenues should scale faster than costs. A lot of these so-called disruptive companies don't have that and never will. Netflix will scale. Amazon was built with that kind of scaling in mind too. Uber and Lyft? I don't think so.

With the recent quest for unicorns, VC's seem to have forgotten about having a viable business model. Unicorn status is all about perception anyway. Finances play a peripheral role, if any. Now they're mad that they're getting burned? What a surprise.

Go watch 2001, a Space Odyssey again. It was done with miniatures and painted glass mattes. It still feels a lot more real than a lot of modern movies.

Comments are most useful when talking about data and its semantics. For some reason, we've gotten so obsessed with the operations, we've forgotten that we're operating on data with real meanings that are usually left to some magic combination of guesswork and discernment.

He was my freshman advisor at UCB. He's a great guy and very much deserves this award.

Sometimes, you find the best stuff outside the heavy lifting tech world. I've been going to South by Southwest Interactive for the past 5 years. It's been a nice counter balance to nuts and bolts tech conferences. I get inspiration and some notion of Good Things to Do. There are plenty of smart people, and that's a major refreshment for me. The focus isn't on tech as much as interesting ways to use it.

There's now an education conference under the SXSW umbrella. That may be worthwhile to you, and easier to get funded.