HP Ready for Break-Up

SAN FRANCISCO—Hewlett-Packard is another casualty of seismic shifts in the way people use technology and big-company sluggishness in responding.
Hewlett-Packard was an early pioneer of what became the model for Silicon Valley startups: Founded in 1939 by two Stanford graduates in a Palo Alto, California garage, HP was long celebrated for its engineering know-how and laid-back corporate culture. It made hefty profits as it grew into a multinational giant that sold a wide range of computer gear and commercial tech services.
But after struggling to keep pace with recent trends like the rise of smartphones and cloud computing. HP's board decided last year to create two smaller companies, each with a narrower focus.
HP Inc. will sell personal computers and printers; Hewlett-Packard Enterprise will sell commercial computer systems, software and tech services. Each will trade separately on the New York Stock Exchange.
The old HP "missed the emergence of the Web," said tech analyst Peter Burris at Forrester Research. "They missed the emergence of mobile."
CEO Meg Whitman will run HP Enterprise, while PC industry veteran Dion Weisler will lead HP Inc. Each will be independent, with "flexibility to respond to a constantly evolving market," Whitman told an investor conference last month. "With less to focus on," she added, "each company will do core things better."
By dividing HP into roughly equal halves, analysts estimate, each spinoff should produce more than $50 billion in sales next year. But skeptics say neither will have the clout of the old HP, which became a leading consumer brand while using its vast size to negotiate volume discounts with suppliers and big contracts with business customers.
"They won't have the impact that HP once had, now that they don't have the depth of portfolio they once had," predicted Rob Enderle, a longtime industry analyst. "It's not clear what HP is anymore."
Each of the spin-offs will face significant challenges: Demand for PCs and printers is continuing to decline, as more people use mobile devices and store their documents and photos online in the cloud.
In the commercial computing sector, more businesses are using online software instead of buying servers and other hardware from companies like HP.
HP recently said it's giving up on competing directly in cloud computing, a growing business in which companies large and small run software in remote data centers operated by Amazon and others.
The same trends are rocking other long-time tech giants. Microsoft has been forced to change the way it sells software, as fewer people buy PCs that run its Windows operating system. PC-maker Dell is shifting its focus to corporate data centers, paying $67 billion to acquire commercial computing giant EMC Corp.
IBM, meanwhile, has sold off units that made personal computers, servers and microprocessors as profits declined in each. It's investing in new sectors with more growth potential, such as data analytics, cybersecurity and cloud computing.
Along with external pressures, HP has struggled with internal problems — a series of controversial CEOs, botched acquisitions and scandals involving top executives and directors.
Critics still debate the wisdom of an earlier decision to spin off a unit that made scientific testing and measurement gear. That was HP's original, and some believe its most innovative, business. It became Agilent Technologies in 2000.
As for the new spinoffs, Forrester's Burris said he's not ready to count them out. "It's reasonable to think both can be thriving companies, but a lot will come down to the quality of their management."

edited from VOA

How Young is Too Young for Modeling? (video)

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NYC to fine Airbnb? (audio)

BlaBlaCar

BlaBlaCar is the world’s biggest ride-sharing service and has 20m users in 19 countries from Mexico to Russia.

The idea behind BlaBlaCar, a French startup, is simple: the driver “sells” empty seats to cover gas and road tolls, but not at a profit; the passenger gets a cheap trip, even last-minute. The business model is that of Airbnb: BlaBlaCar takes an average 10% cut on transactions once it is established in a market; trust is built through peer review. Investors seem to bet that it could do for transport what Airbnb has for accommodation. Last month BlaBlaCar raised €180m ($200m), taking its valuation to €1.4 billion, making it one of the rare European billion-dollar-plus technology startups.

For now, BlaBlaCar has avoided Uber-style collision with regulators and incumbents. This is chiefly because it is not competing with taxis: its average trip is 320km (200 miles). Rather, it is undercutting trains and coaches, proving popular among young people and students, short of cash and allergic to forward planning. A road trip from Paris to Marseille using BlaBlaCar, for instance, would cost half that of a high-speed TGV train ticket. Frédéric Mazzella, the founder, says diplomatically that it is disrupting the mobility business, by opening up the inventory of empty car seats, not any particular transport sector.

Originally called Covoiturage (carpooling, in French), BlaBlaCar is focusing now on building a global brand, rather than on profitability. The firm has expanded both by buying competitors, such as Germany’s Carpooling, which it acquired in April, and launching in emerging markets less familiar with the concept, such as India and soon Brazil. The service does well where public transport is chaotic, or driving costs high. In Europe, over 72% of kilometers travelled are by car, but gas is expensive so drivers are keen to cover costs.

 “When you start from France,” Nicolas Brusson, the firm’s co-founder, joked at a technology conference earlier this year, “everything looks simple.”

edited from The Economist

Adele Announces New Album (audio)

British singer Adele perfoms the song "Skyfall" from film "Skyfall," nominated as best orginal song, at the 85th Academy Awards in Hollywood, California

Let's listen to ‘Hello' taken from the new album, 25

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 Hello, ___________________me 
I was wondering if after all ___________________you'd like to meet 
To ___________________everything 
They say ___________________'s supposed to heal ya, 
but I ain't done ___________________healing 

Hello, can you ___________________me? 
I'm in ___________________dreaming about who we used to be
When we were ___________________and free 
I've forgotten how it ___________________
before the world ___________________ at our feet 
There's such a difference between us 
And a million ___________________ 

Hello from the ___________________side
 I must've called a thousand ___________________ 
To tell you I'm _____________for everything 
that I've ________________ 
But when I call you never____________ to be home 

 Hello from the ___________________ 
___________________I can say that I've tried 
To tell you I'm ___________________breaking your heart 
But it don't matter, it ___________________doesn't tear you apart 
Anymore 

 Hello, how are you? 
It's so _______________of me to talk about_________________, 
I'm sorry 
I hope that you're well
 Did you ever ___________________of that town 
where nothing ever___________________? 
 It's no ___________________that the both of us 
Are ___________________of time

Argentina's first-ever runoff election (audio)

Top opposition presidential candidate Mauricio Macri dances and sings after speaking to supporters in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Sunday, Oct. 25, 2015.

Oslo parks its cars (audio)

Oslo

Ghost Hunting in Norway

Moss

MOSS, Norway — Like many Europeans, Marianne Haaland Bogdanoff, a travel agency manager in this southern Norwegian town, does not go to church, except maybe at Christmas, and is doubtful about the existence of God.

But when “weird things” — inexplicable computer breakdowns, strange smells and noises and complaints from staff members of constant headaches — started happening at the ground-floor travel office, she slowly began to put aside her deep skepticism about life beyond the here and now. After computer experts, electricians and a plumber all failed to find the cause of her office’s troubles, she finally got help from a clairvoyant who claimed powers to communicate with the dead. The headaches and other problems all vanished.

“I don’t know what she did,” Ms. Bogdanoff said. “It was very strange,” she added, recalling how the clairvoyant “cleansed” her travel office of a ghostlike presence neither she nor her staff had seen but whose existence they had all felt and feared.

Ghosts, or at least belief in them, have been around for centuries but they have now found a particularly strong following in highly secular modern countries like Norway.

 “Belief in God, or at least a Christian God, is decreasing but belief in spirits is increasing,” said Roar Fotland, a Methodist preacher and assistant professor at the Norwegian School of Theology in Oslo. Instead of slowly eliminating religion, as Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx and other theorists predicted, modernity has only channeled religious feelings in unexpected ways, Mr. Fotland said.

The appeal of ghost stories has helped fuel the unexpected popularity of a television series called “The Power of Spirits,” now in its 10th season. The show has around half a million viewers each Sunday, a huge audience in a country of just 5.1 million people and more than twice the number of regular churchgoers in Norway.

“We are bigger than the Norwegian church,” the show’s presenter, Tom Stromnaess, said. He does not believe in ghosts as “creatures with white sheets and black eyes” but, though initially very skeptical about paranormal phenomena, he has come around to the view that forces exist that cannot be seen or understood.

Hundreds of people write to the show to complain that their house or workplace is haunted and to ask for help. “So many people cannot all be crazy,” Mr. Stromnaess said.

Two years ago, when a home buyer in the town of Vinstra, 160 miles north of Oslo, came to believe that the house he had agreed to buy was haunted, he tried to get the purchase canceled, arguing that he should have been told about the ghost problem.

A court ruled that the buyer had to go through with the transaction. Its verdict said that the seller had no obligation to disclose the existence of something that is “not generally accepted as existing at all.” The court said it could not accept that “alleged mystical events in the form of ghosts fulfill the criterion of being a defect in the property.”

Also deeply skeptical is Velle Espeland, a folklorist at Norway’s national library and author of a book on the history of ghosts. “We create ghosts to explain the inexplicable. Ghosts are just the name we use for something we don’t understand.”

The town of Moss has had so many ghost stories that City Hall organized a “ghost tour” led by Vibecke Garnaas, a woman who used to work at the “haunted” travel agency and who has now become a professional medium who charges an hourly rate of 800 Norwegian kroner, around $98, for ghost “cleansing” work.

“I can’t guarantee it will work,” she said, explaining that she tries to “convince the energies to leave the premises but they have free will just like we do.”

Belief in ghosts has become so strong that even the Lutheran Church, to which most Norwegians formally belong, has adopted a so-called “ghost liturgy” for use by preachers who get asked by parishioners to help cleanse haunted houses.

Unn Bohm Tveito, also from Moss, recalled how she had never believed in or even thought about ghosts until she started working as the manager of the town’s tourism information office. She kept noticing that German-language brochures always ended up being the most prominently displayed, which was odd since few tourists who visit Moss speak German.

In 2013, she raised the issue with other staff members, who said they had noticed the same thing. “Ghosts are not the first thing you think of but we decided that this could not be explained in a normal way,” she said.

A clairvoyant sent by the ghost television show, she said, solved the mystery: a dead German soldier who had worked in the same building during the 1940-1945 Nazi occupation of Norway was still on the premises and kept messing with the brochures.

“Whether you call them ghosts or spirits or something else they exist,” Ms. Tveito said. The dead German, she added, has now moved on.

 

Moss

edited from The New York Times

 

Escape Rooms (audio)

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"Back to the Future" Day is here (video)

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Mismanagement Of Bridge Project (audio)

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China's First Glass-Bottom Bridge (video)

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Oops! The Chinese Spy Is a US Professor

(Newser) – The next time the Justice Department decides to arrest a "spy" for sending classified scientific information to China, it might try consulting a scientist first.

 In what the New York Times describes as an "embarrassing acknowledgement" for prosecutors and the FBI, espionage charges have been dropped against Xi Xiaoxing, a 57-year-old American citizen who has been in the US since 1989 and was the chairman of Temple University's physics department when he was arrested in May. 

He was accused of illegally sending blueprints of a pocket heater to China, but the charges were dismissed after experts—including the device's co-inventor—explained that the blueprints were of something else and Xi was engaged in normal academic cooperation. 

The prosecution involved "fundamental mistakes and misunderstandings about the science and technology," Xi's lawyer notes that the blunder came amid a major push to counter Chinese economic espionage. 

 Xi, who was arrested by armed agents who stormed his home, says the incident has badly damaged his academic career and his research into superconductors. 

"I don’t expect them to understand everything I do," he told The New York Times. "But the fact that they don't consult with experts and then charge me? Put my family through all this? Damage my reputation? They shouldn't do this. This is not a joke. This is not a game”. 


Readers's comments

Scott603 • 2 hours ago

He probably can't sleep at night, his family is traumatized, and his career that he worked his entire life for is badly damaged and they can't even apologize?

I hope he sues and gets at least $10 million in damages.

JoeQ Scott603 • 35 minutes ago

I agree. We should expect a better quality of government than this.

False prosecution is one side of the coin. The flip side is failure to catch the people who really should be caught. How do they catch espionage when that cannot recognize it?

Scott603 JoeQ • 23 minutes ago

Oh I agree completely! It does seem incredibly odd that they would say "OMG, he's e-mailing technical stuff that we can't understand to China! Let's ram his door in, scare him half to death, and put him in jail" without even doing the absolute most minimal effort job to determine what they were looking at.

You might expect this from a small town police department, but the FBI?

And... what if he or his wife had a heart attack and died when they kicked the door in? Or what if he shot and killed one of them and they shot him back?

No knock warrants are incredibly dangerous and stupid. This guy was a professor who went to the same office in the same school each day. Why do you have to ram his door down in the middle of the night?

J MATIAS D • 2 hours ago

You would be amazed on how many chineses spies are in the next door.

Roddy Pfeiffer • 2 hours ago

Welcome to America.

Mr_Joshua Roddy Pfeiffer • 2 hours ago

The root problem is that we allow emigrants to settle in our first world countries but unless we make them truly welcome and treat them as equal citizens from day one, the natural tendency is for them to retreat to their own communities for support, and the more that happens, the less the chance that they will integrate into our societies and the more isolated from us they become.

The "Welcome to America" most emigrants receive is: "Ok, you're here but you're not the same as us, or as good as us and we're watching you closely."

hunter Mr_Joshua • 13 minutes ago

They call this the self-fulfilling prophesy in sociology. I think the problem is less top-down than it is bottom-up in terms of the bias (conscious or not) carried by the public at large.

Scott603 Mr_Joshua • 2 hours ago

If I could give your post 10 thumbs up I would.

Then you end up with a cycle of poverty and crime.

In the mid 1800's in Boston people sued the city to not have Irish kids next to them in school. Today the Irish aren't discriminated against in Boston and they run the city and hold positions of power and prestige.

Mr. Joshua is 100% right. If we take in Syrians we absolutely have to welcome them, and invite them to be Americans, not just people in America.

J MATIAS D • 2 hours ago

What happen is that the man is playing smart , and is getting away with that .

JoeQ • 3 hours ago

How dumb was that? The JD should have experts at their disposal to look over evidence like this before taking action.

Reluctant Patriot • 4 hours ago

Like I keep saying - 'everything the government touches turns to shite'.

something similar and she has yet to work again.....

No-Left-Turn • 4 hours ago

I have read that the JD has not exactly been contrite, other than oops. What is it with government types that they are beyond apologizing profusely for ruining people's lives?

worldcat No-Left-Turn • 3 hours ago

Well, Trump declared on the Tonight Show that he'll apologize if he's ever wrong. Maybe the "government types" share the same attitude. Trump will be a good fit with them.

Blackbird kumatose • 3 hours ago

Armed agent stormed his home. The agents storm homes not out of necessity but for their own sick fun.