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Earthquakes, AshClouds, Oil Spills, Floods, and iPads

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Some events alter the landscape forever and, as humans, our reactions to those events often alter them even more in the aftermath. The last few months have seen some large events visited on the planet by Mother Nature and at least one by man. And of course when it comes to earthquakes, volcanoes, and flooding our survival and compassionate instincts kick into high gear. When it comes to man-made disasters the same happens and then we try to figure out why it happened and how we can keep it from happening again.

Certainly Apple’s release of the iPad is not comparable on any human or environmental scale to the events mentioned in the headline above. We’re talking computers and gadgets here. That said, Apple’s iPad has sent tremors through the tech industry (and a few others) and, from the looks of things, the ground hasn’t stopped shaking yet. Or at least those trying to find their footing in the iPad’s wake are still wobbling around on shaky legs.

Face it, regardless of how successful the iPad may or may not prove to be in the long run, selling 1,000,000 units in 28 days has altered the landscape now and  the reactions to that quick burst out of the gate have the potential to alter things for quite some time. The truth of the matter is no one has a clear path how to move forward yet, given how early in the event it still is.

We’re seeing charts and statistics and reports that the iPad is devastating Netbook sales. We’re hearing news that projects like the Microsoft Courier are being canceled. Rumors swirl around the HP Slate, prompted in large part by HP’s acquisition of Palm and its statement of “doubling down on WebOS.” Smartbooks barely made it past the pretty rendering stage, and now it looks like the delays there will continue.

Essentially many of the hopes and promises laid out at CES2010 (and before) have been shelved or shoved off into 2011 as OEMs try to regroup and chart a new course. This morning on Twitter Steve “Chippy” Paine tweeted this in response to Mike Cane:

Smartbooks have been delayed while the OEMs change their underwear!

In many respects I think that sums things up nicely for many in the tech sector. Unfortunately the truth of that means that most are in catch up mode and playing follow the leader.

In reality the unpredictable ground we’re walking on now started showing cracks awhile ago when Asus and other Netbook manufacturers challenged the Microsoft and Intel dominance in the heady days when Netbooks were blowing markets wide open. Some of those disruptions (VIA processors, Linux OS) didn’t really catch on, but the cracks remained. ARM became a bigger part of the discussion and now seems poised to have a bigger place at the table going forward. Om Malik talks about this a bit and says Intel’s recent news about the Z6 platform is more catch up than leadership, and I think he’s probably correct.

As we watch entrenched players like Microsoft, Intel, and Adobe (and their partners) try to adjust it is like watching victims clean up after a natural disaster. It seems apparent to me that the shake up or shake out or shake shake shake that is going on now is even more unpredictable than it was a month before Apple sold a million iPads. The reactionary decisions being made or contemplated today will have impact for at least a few years when it comes to future product lines. You can bet that in the board rooms and offices of tech businesses everywhere that someone somewhere is saying that they will never get caught like this again.

We certainly live in interesting times.

3 Comments

3 Comments

  1. Sumocat

    05/06/2010 at 8:43 am

    Chippy captured it perfectly. The feeling I got out of CES, as I said before, is that everyone wanted to see what Apple was going to do first. Here they were, ahead of Apple, waiting for Apple to go first. And now, after seeing what Apple’s got, they don’t know how to respond. It’s so aggravating.

  2. Doctor_Roe

    05/06/2010 at 10:59 am

    Aggravating is …. the wait to see. I am ready to plunk down my hard earned $$ to buy a 64gb iPad but I wanted to wait until iPad 3G. Now that 3G is out I am glad I waited and was thinking I will just use my Verizon MiFi and buy the 64gb. OK, so no removable storage, OK no ink, etc. Concessions that I am sort-of willing to live with considering it’s position in my world. But wait, what is just around the corner? HP and WebOS? probably WITH all the *things* as a PC user, we are used to having? USB, etc? What’s that? Android on someone elses tablet? What’s over there? Vendor XYZ has upgradable ram?

    My dilemma is now this. I WANT an iPad or iPad-like device, but I also do NOT need to concede on the other points if I am willing to wait. So here I sit, frustrated, reading EVERYTHING I can get my hands on to see what is around the corner, and WISHING for Fall of 2010 when the Holiday rush begins! Any vendor hoping to make it in 2010 with this new non-netbook world we live in, will have some product to market.

    Hey Warner, can I borrow your iPad?

  3. Elijah The Prophet John

    05/06/2010 at 1:04 pm

    Excerpt from the New York World

    Telegram, July 11, 1935 –

    Nikola Tesla revealed that an earthquake which drew police and ambulances to the region of his laboratory at 48 E. Houston St., New York, in 1898, was the result of a little machine he was experimenting with at the time which”you could put in your overcoat pocket.” The bewildered newspapermen pounced upon this as at least one thing they could understand and Nikola Tesla, “the father of modern electricity” told what had happened as follows:
    Tesla stated, “I was experimenting with vibrations. I had one of my machines going and I wanted to see if I could get it in tune with the vibration of the building. I put it up notch after notch. There was a peculiar cracking sound. I asked my assistants where did the sound come from. They did not know. I put the machine up a few more notches. There was a louder cracking sound. I knew I was approaching the vibration of the steel building. I pushed the machine a little higher. “Suddenly all the heavy machinery in the place was flying around. I grabbed a hammer and broke the machine. The building would have been about our ears in another few minutes. Outside in the street there was pandemonium. The police and ambulances arrived. I told my assistants to say nothing. We told the police it must have been an earthquake. That’s all they ever knew about it.”

    Some shrewd reporter asked Dr. Tesla at this point what he would need to destroy the Empire State Building and the doctor replied: “Vibration will do anything. It would only be necessary to step up the vibrations of the machine to fit the natural vibration of the building and the building would come crashing down. That’s why soldiers break step crossing a bridge.”

    “On the occasion of his annual birthday celebration interview by the press on July 10, 1935 in his suite at the Hotel New Yorker, Tesla announced a method of transmitting mechanical energy accurately with minimal loss over any terrestrial distance, including a related new means of communication and a method, he claimed, which would facilitate the unerring location of underground mineral deposits. At that time he recalled the earth-trembling “quake” that brought police and ambulances rushing to the scene of his Houston Street laboratory while an experiment was in progress with one of his mechanical oscillators…”

    Nikola Tesla waited 37 years to brag of this incident in 1898, but the very next year in 1899 he dropped everything an went out west to Colorado Springs.
    Nikola Tesla caused the September 1899 Cape Yakataga and Yakutat Bay earthquakes in Alaska from Colorado Springs.
    On…
    September 3, 1899
    September 6, 1899
    September 9, 1899
    “If you only knew the magnificence of the three, the six and the nine…
    then you would have a key to the universe.”
    -Nikola Tesla
    (AFTER CAUSING THREE EARTHQUAKES)

    It has been a 111 year non correlation between his Pike’s Peak work and the story of eight
    prospectors were panning the glacial sands near Hubbard Glacier when Earth starting shaking and never seemed to stop. A few days
    later, they had survived a natural phenomenon they probably should not have. The shore uplifted during a massive 1899 earthquake near
    Yakutat. The Earthquakes at Yakutat Bay, Alaska in September, 1899. Geologists Ralph Tarr and Lawrence Martin, in the area a few years
    later to study the marvelous glaciers, saw things like mussels “resembling clumps of blue flowers” on rocks thrown up 20 feet above the
    ocean. They saw so much evidence of a giant earthquake they interviewed a few prospectors in Yakutat and included their stories in a
    1912 government paper, “The Earthquakes at Yakutat Bay, Alaska, in September, 1899. When Tarr and Martin arrived in Yakutat,
    prospector A. Flenner was working as a carpenter there six years after the series of large earthquakes, the biggest being a magnitude 8.0
    that happened on Sept. 10, 1899. Flenner had been panning for gold in the area that day. “Mr. Flenner stated in 1905 that after the first
    shock on September 3 they rigged up a home-made seismograph, consisting of hunting knives hung so that their points touched and
    would jingle under a slight oscillation,” Tarr and Martin wrote. “With this instrument (rude, perhaps, but more delicate than their own
    perception) they counted 52 shocks on September 10, up to the time of the heavy disturbance (the 8.0 earthquake) that caused so much
    damage.” Another miner, L.A. Cox, was also at the scene. “About 9 a.m. on the 10th we had a very severe shock (what USGS later
    calculated as a magnitude 7.4 foreshock), so violent that one could hardly keep his feet,” Cox said. “The low alder brush shook and bent
    like reeds in a gale of wind. (Then, at) 1:30 p.m., we got the king bee of them all.” The king bee was a massive earthquakes that CHANGED THE MAP!
    Shattered
    glaciers, lifted areas of shoreline 47 feet out of the water, and caused “the death of millions of individuals,” Tarr and Martin wrote. Those
    individuals were fish and crabs deposited on land, and barnacles, mussels and other rock-clinging organisms thrust high above the water
    level.The prospector Cox further described the big earthquake:
    “The ground (was) cutting some of the queerest capers imaginable. In addition to the circular motion of the preceding heavy shock, it was
    waving up and down like the swells of the sea, only with considerably more energy.”
    On glacial sands that often liquefy during a large earthquake, the prospectors were lucky to survive the episode as natural forces ate
    their camp and all their supplies.
    “We ran from our tents, leaving everything behind, and were never able to rescue anything from it after,” prospector J.P. Fults said.
    “Above us about 100 yards was a lake.This lake broke from its bed and dashed down upon our camp while we ran along the shore and
    escaped its fury. This deluge was almost immediately followed by one from the sea. A wall of water 20 feet high came in upon the flood
    from the lake and carried all debris back over the undulating morianic hills.
    “We protected ourselves from being carried away by tearing up clothes and tying ourselves to the small alder trees growing on the
    mountainsides,” Fults said.
    The remarkable part of this story is that no one died despite the bad placement of the miners. Tarr and Martin attributed the earthquake
    to the impressive tectonic activity researchers today know as the Yakutat Block crashing into southern Alaska, giving rise to the highest
    coastal mountain range on Earth.

    The following are figments of my imagination, i’m sure, combined with misinterpreted phenomenon explained very poorly with the entirely untrue story of a young Army Air Corps flight navigator from East Saint Louis who saw Television for the first time at the Chicago Worlds Fair and became the first licensed television technician ever in the state of Illinois. This was before the young man went on to become an explosives engineer that invented the very first successfully deployed crash bag using CO2 gas in the fifties. Now that was before designing the charge that blows the wings out on the cruise missile mid flight which was before designing the inertial upper stage of the space shuttle which was well before designing the pop-top charge that blows the clear the path for our nuke to get out of those silos even after an almost direct hit which was before retiring senior vice of a major defense contractor who was back and forth from Northrop to Boeing to Sandia to Pharump with top security clearance all over the country who very likely did many more things than a paragraph can describe here or I can know. I do remember, being often intrigued by his refusal to discuss further with me, his grandson, many seemingly harmless and some not so harmless subjects. To make a long story short I would like to ask you what it means when this man who would not lie and thought a quibble much worse than a lie… after sending me out across town from the hospice in the middle of the night to bring to his deathbed a Bible and the failed mission comments when I returned first with his wife my Grandmother’s Catholic Bible this man who made me go back out and find HIS BIBLE… the I guess Non Catholic Bible, AND HOLDING THAT BIBLE… TOLD ME THAT NIKOLA TESLA MADE EARTHQUAKES IN 1899. THEN HE TOLD ME AGAIN THAT TESLA MADE EARTHQUAKES IN 1899, WHICH OPPOSES WHAT HE SAID WAS LAW THAT NOTHING CAN BE CREATED OR DESTROYED…ONLY CHANGED…YET EARTHQUAKES FROM EVEN A LIGHTNING BOLT WOULD BE GETTING OUT EXPONENTALY MORE THAN WHAT YOU PUT IN. SOME GOLD PANNING 49ER TYPES WERE PAID OFF AND THE ESKIMOS DIDN’T EVEN UNDERSTAND WHAT MONEY WAS LAUGHING AND THEY WERE THE ONLY ONES in the WHOLE WORLD WHO NOTICED IT HAD EVEN HAPPENED AND EVEN THEY DID NOT FATHOM. Then he died in that bed with that Bible. I did not tell anyone of this event and could have taken it to my grave had there not been so many damn earthquakes lately.
    Now I hope that you see why from my shoes reverse engineering THE GREATEST STORY IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD from facts that I was blessed to already know as true sometimes can appear less than sane or scientific amid unfathomable disinformation tactics and epic lies placed as cornerstones in the structure of our very reality.
    I solved the Nikola Tesla riddle of the 369. Tesla has accomplished many marvelous inventions and had many great discoveries in electrical engineering BUT THIS ONE YOU DID NOT HEAR. It is the total truth without quibble and the very reason for all the rumors and disinformation. Now, after 111 years and with the dawn of two new centuries, I announce an achievement which will amaze the entire universe, and which eclipses the wildest dream of even the most visionary scientist. Nikola Tesla made earthquakes in 1899. That my friends is the universal key to unlock so many lies under guise of freedom..
    Tesla made earthquakes in 1899.
    September 3, 1899
    September 6, 1899
    September 9, 1899
    If you only knew the mag-nificence of the three, six & nine that in truth are dates in September, 1899, when Tesla made the land wave like the sea, Yakutat Bay earthquakes from Colorado Springs you hear and now see. Have an ear to fathom the extent and danger from this the greatest discovery of all time, a literal and symbolic key to the universe left by Nikola Tesla who’s character and many clue’s had way too much pride to out last time nameless.

    By YOURPENGUY

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