Fortysomething Geek

If you think Apple is a marketing machine, you will be completely surprised by this chart.


Samsung spent more this year than Apple, Dell , HP in the last four years combined.
Think about it. It is also bigger than Apple, HP, Dell, Microsoft and Coca Cola combined.

Wow, I did not know that. No wonder there are so many S3s flooding the market.


Source: Business Insider , CNNMoney, Cost of Selling Galaxies.

On August 5th 2012, HP posted a price mistake on one of their Deskstop PC by accident.

Instead of receiving 120ドル off a computer, the computer itself in any configuration was 120ドル.

Somehow, the system allowed you to build and customize a computer with all the trimmings (multiple SSDs, Nividia GT640 GPU, monitors) for a total price of 120ドル. On top of that, you could stack coupons to bring it down to as low as 70ドル. Basically, you could have built a 2,500ドル computer for less than 100ドル.


Thousands of users flocked discounts sites to jump in on this deal.


Unfortunately, it was obviously a price mistake.


I was lucky to get a cancellation for the 120ドル PC and a 200ドル HP credit and got a nice freebie from HP. Many people got free blu-ray players, 23" monitors, Beats by Dre headphones, and free printers. And yet, they are still complaining they got cheated.

I was one of the lucky few to grab a few Touchpads during the infamous "Fire-Sale."
It has been 9 months of ownership and how has does it hold up? I'm still undecided.

First of all, the hardware is clunky and un-reliable. I bought one for my dad and it was sent in FOUR times for service. During the post file sale period, HP did not issue replacements. Each time they went in for service, my dad was without his Touchpad for weeks. His Touchpad is stock webOS so his problems were strictly hardware. My 32GB model has been sent in once. There is already a crack along the speaker edge. Moreover, the device is rather heavy. I owned all the generations of iPad and the Touchpad feels heavier than the 1st gen iPad.

At 99ドル-149,ドル I really can't complain. There were times I was tempted to unload them on Craigslist or Ebay. I wish I did because I could have gotten 300ドル or so for a 32GB in the early days.

As luck would have it, there were always something that made me keep it.

I'll list a couple of cool things.

I could run basilisk 2 to emulate a mac classic "in-color."


I installed Ubuntu on it. Running mySQL Administrator, Python, full desktop Chromium/Firefox was cool. WebOS version of CHROOT doesn't require a goofy VNC server like on Android. WebOS's preware gives you a native X11 server.