Category: Rants

HP P212 SCSI card that isn’t SCSI, kind of.

HP recently shipped us a P212 SCSI RAID card; this was chosen for our new Quantum tape drive. After a week of fighting with it, we tried an alternate SCSI card (non RAID) at the suggestion of Quantum, and Voila, all problems disappeared. Quantum claims (perhaps true, perhaps not) that some of the SCSI RAID cards are not implementing the full generic SCSI protocol and don’t handle having non-disk systems on their bus. So, hopefully Google picks up this HP P212 SCSI RAID card (PN: 013218-001) and anyone else struggling with this will see this!

G.E. Handheld UltraSound: from US$250,000 to US$7,000 in 5 months!

Last week I noticed the Beeb had a story on G.E.’s new hand-held ultrasound (story).

Developer GE Healthcare says the portable device, priced at about £5,000 in the UK, is not designed to replace existing machines.

I did a search around and found that it was actually released back in October 2009 (story).

GE has just unveiled this device at the Web 2.0 summit, and they estimate that its cost will be about $250,000.

So between 10th October 2009 and mid February 2010, some 19 weeks, the price has dropped by some US$240,000. That’s a drop of US$12,000 a week, US$1,800 a day, or $75 an hour. Imaging trying to put a purchase order together for one – you just can’t nail down a price. I would guess this isn’t a linear price drop, because in about 10 days from now (Feb 2010) they they would be free!
What will be interesting is when you can rent one for a few months for home use. Wow; wonder what interesting things people would ultrasound? Pets? Tracing the wiring in walls? Injuries? Perhaps they’ll be used by pro-sports players on the field to assess injury?

Dreamscreen update: same problems

Yesterday (Feb 7th) my HP Dreamscreen advised on-screen that there was a firmware update (1.6.0.0, 2/1/2010). “Hurrah!” I thought. They’ve seen the issue with the Snapfish app being unable to load images and crashing to the “home” screen.

Sadly, not. It still fails to load most thumbnails in both the list of all albums, and when browsing a single album. Aghhh!

And there’s still no SDK. No way for me to write my own app to make it work like I want it to. There’s such a potential for this as a platform, but HP isn’t allowing this to be realised. *sigh*

HP DreamScreen: recent developments

The DreamScreen is unwell. It’s Snapfish application is dying. Repeatedly. And it’s not showing the Snapfish albums when it does run….

I thought it was a weak Wifi signal, but after re-positioning the router to within 2 metres of the DreamScreen, I think its safe to say it’s not.

When starting the Snapfish application (why can’t it automatically “sleep” to this app?) it tried to download the list of albums. It seems to know how many albums I have, but fails to get the thumbnails, and the album titles. Trying to browse an album seems to again know how many items there are, but again the thumbnails fail. Trying to show a high res crashes the app, and the main menu screen is shown again.

Tut tut, HP:

  1. Your Snapfish app (HP’s stack on the dream screen hardware) doesn’t seem to be resilient enough to handle data returned to it and crashes. Bad.
  2. HP runs Snapfish – if that’s returning new/different data, then that’s Snapfish’s fault for modifying a “stable” API. Which is HP.  Bad.
  3. There is no diagnosis that I can access to see what the error is. Bad.
  4. There is no way for me to write an app onto this platform, still. Bad.

There was talk of an open SDK at one stage, but I’ve not seen any sign of it. Hum….

If HP doesn’t resolve this issue, or free the platform to let people develop more useful apps, then it will circle the plughole and die! An opportunity for a great product missed.