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HP-UX is not good enough. The only way to go is to leverage their most secure operating system that also is capable of far better clustering than most versions of Unix:
OpenVMS (http://www.openvms.compaq.com/)

Hewlett-Packard / Compaq

Gateway 2000 now Gateway

Packard Bell

As always, you're not nearly as fabulous as you think you are, Apple.

BTW the female told me that Open VMS is not UNIX

OpenVMS isn't UNIX, though many UNIX commands have been ported to it. What is OpenVMS? Which is better, OpenVMS or UNIX?

OpenVMS was designed entirely within HP and specifically within the former Digital Equipment Corporation (DIGITAL). ...It was once certainly true that OpenVMS and UNIX were quite different. In more recent times, there are tools and C APIs on OpenVMS that directly provide or that easily support porting UNIX programs and commands

its just an application that runs on a Microsoft Server!

I assume they were running it in a VAX hardware emulator on a Microsoft Server. Although OpenVMS does natively support Intel Itanium-based servers, so it's possible that a Microsoft Server with the Itanium chipset could be repurposed to run OpenVMS.

I only know what I see. This is what I see: you were ill-informed and ended up looking like a moron.

BTW the female told me that Open VMS is not UNIX

OpenVMS isn't UNIX, though many UNIX commands have been ported to it. What is OpenVMS? Which is better, OpenVMS or UNIX?

OpenVMS was designed entirely within HP and specifically within the former Digital Equipment Corporation (DIGITAL). ...It was once certainly true that OpenVMS and UNIX were quite different. In more recent times, there are tools and C APIs on OpenVMS that directly provide or that easily support porting UNIX programs and commands

its just an application that runs on a Microsoft Server!

I assume they were running it in a VAX hardware emulator on a Microsoft Server. Although OpenVMS does natively support Intel Itanium-based servers, so it's possible that a Microsoft Server with the Itanium chipset could be repurposed to run OpenVMS.

I only know what I see. This is what I see: you were ill-informed and ended up looking like a moron.

BTW the female told me that Open VMS is not UNIX

OpenVMS isn't UNIX, though many UNIX commands have been ported to it. What is OpenVMS? Which is better, OpenVMS or UNIX?

OpenVMS was designed entirely within HP and specifically within the former Digital Equipment Corporation (DIGITAL). ...It was once certainly true that OpenVMS and UNIX were quite different. In more recent times, there are tools and C APIs on OpenVMS that directly provide or that easily support porting UNIX programs and commands

its just an application that runs on a Microsoft Server!

I assume they were running it in a VAX hardware emulator on a Microsoft Server. Although OpenVMS does natively support Intel Itanium-based servers, so it's possible that a Microsoft Server with the Itanium chipset could be repurposed to run OpenVMS.

I only know what I see. This is what I see: you were ill-informed and ended up looking like a moron.

BTW the female told me that Open VMS is not UNIX

OpenVMS isn't UNIX, though many UNIX commands have been ported to it. What is OpenVMS? Which is better, OpenVMS or UNIX?

OpenVMS was designed entirely within HP and specifically within the former Digital Equipment Corporation (DIGITAL). ...It was once certainly true that OpenVMS and UNIX were quite different. In more recent times, there are tools and C APIs on OpenVMS that directly provide or that easily support porting UNIX programs and commands

its just an application that runs on a Microsoft Server!

I assume they were running it in a VAX hardware emulator on a Microsoft Server. Although OpenVMS does natively support Intel Itanium-based servers, so it's possible that a Microsoft Server with the Itanium chipset could be repurposed to run OpenVMS.

I only know what I see. This is what I see: you were ill-informed and ended up looking like a moron.

Compaqs website. They have their brand name on their computers and laptops.

That's the ARC console - it's freezing probably trying to netboot or init a lost piece of hardware. Hit ESC and you should get to the console.

Check here: http://www.compaq.com/AlphaServer/technology/literature/srmcons.pdf

$8000 for the HP Storageworks San kit

"The 8Gb Simple SAN Connection Kit consists of an enterprise-class 8 Gbps switch, four 81Q HBAs, and SSCM - along with all the cables, 8 Gbps SFPs and documentation you need.

I did see one for $2000, which is what we were going to buy at one point, but I can't find the link. It wasn't an 8Gb san though! I have found a £2000 HP switch

Ok, I'm not going to have one at home, but if you're buying all the discs you need, another $8k is not much.

Second level ARC is standard in recent ZFS; you could just plonk some X25-M's in your X4240, attach a disk shelf to it, configure ZFS to use the SSD's as secondary ARC for it, and pretty much have something like what Sun are selling.

You know, just with less vendor support, and more effort involved in building, configuring, tuning and testing. If you come out of it with change from $10k, you probably earned it with the effort you put in.

If it's a Compaq, there is a program called NOF1 that will flip some bits in the CMOS so your computer will start up even w/o a keyboard, at least until your CMOS battery dies. It's from the 386 days but I have used it on machines as new as PIIIs (don't have any newer Compaqs to try it on.)

As usual you will need an icky DOS boot disk or something like it.

ftp://ftp.compaq.com/pub/softpaq/sp0501-1000/SP066 7.ZIP

There were so many double-quotes in that write up that I thought it was a """paean to VMS""". It's nice to see that Python continues the practice.

First off, I don't fully understand what this guy is proposing: having a set of small desktops and monitors to drag between classes is hugely inefficient compared to laptops. You'd need keyboards, mice, the boxes themselves, and the monitors, and then have to power them. A laptop "cart" would save space since they'd all be the same size and could fit in a slotted arrangement that would be much easier to transport.

Another thing you could do with the laptops is have some sort of charging station for batteries (I don't know if these exist or not -- your way to make your $millions). For instance, one class gets the laptops for the hour, uses them, then returns them and puts the batteries into a charging station on the trolley with another set ready to go for the next class. The trolley is plugged into the wall in each room it goes into. This would eliminate the need for powering them with what are essentially car or motorcycle battries, although laptop batteries do die after awhile... Depending on your school's network setup, you could either have wireless installed throughout the school, or have an AP on the trolley that plugs in when the trolley is in a classroom, and then hooks into an Ethernet jack in the wall. Maybe a couple APs on different channels since 30 kids fighting over one could get nasty.

Actually, after researching this for a minute, I found this:
http://gem.compaq.com/gemstore/SubFamilies.asp?Pro ductLineId=9&FamilyId=90&oi=E9CED

I guess HP will make the millions on the idea, but you could be one to implement it.

I doubt that will happen as long as we (those of us who have to deal with users every day) need to refer users to KB articles like this one: http://www29.compaq.com/falco/detail.asp?FAQnum=FA Q2859

1. Ad-Aware SE
2. Spybot Search & Destroy
3. SpywareBlaster
4. Microsoft Anti-Spyware
5. Some Anti-Virus Program that you like (at my work, we install Norton even though it is a resource hog, but never Norton Internet Security since it eventually always fucks a computer up)

Set your Anti-virus program to scan at least weekly, and automatically update itself, Update and sca with Ad-Aware and Spybot weekly at a minimum, and update and protect with SpywareBlaster weekly at a minimum.

It is absolutely ridiculous that a person should have to do this to keep their computer running decently. We get so many Windows machines in the shop that it isn't even funny, but thusfar, whenever we have managed to convince someone to upgrade to a MacOS X machine (Typically when their Dell, Compaq, HP, E-Machines has a motherboard failure). They have came back completely excited and astonished that they don't really have to worry about spyware and viruses so much.

My reccomendation on keeping your WIndows XP machine in top performance. Go buy a high-end Mac and run VirtualPC if it can run whatever program you NEED to run (Note: Games do not count), if you cannot run your Prorgram under VPC, buy a low-end PC and keep it off the network.

http://web14.compaq.com/falco/detail.asp?FAQnum=FA Q2859

And of course.. ample documentation... http://web14.compaq.com/falco/detail.asp?FAQnum=FA Q2859/

Apple invented the hard drive-based portable MP3 jukebox?

Um, I had an Archos Jukebox long before the first iPod came out (and got lots of weird stares from people trying to explain to them what it was). And the Personal Jukebox came out even before the Archos did.

Apple didn't invent the hard drive-based portable MP3 jukebox -- they perfected it. May not seem like a big difference, but let's not write the people who did the actual inventing out of the history books...

I guess this product was totally forgettable

http://research.compaq.com/SRC/pjb/

ah well...

I'm sorry, you're confusing Vax/VMS with the later OpenVMS port to Alpha. Vax/VMS was the original operating system Cutler was involved in designing and developing, and it was written in Vax assembly. It was renamed to OpenVMS in 1991, after work had begun to port it to Alpha.

Alpha itself was only approved as an advanced development project by DEC management in 1989, and actual Alpha product development didn't start until 1990. Moreover, porting VMS to Alpha required adding Vax-like features to Alpha in the Pal-code layer -- it still couldn't have been ported to other architectures. NT, on the other hand, was originally developed on the Intel i860, and later the MIPS R4000, with a concurrent port to x86.

When Cutler left DEC and joined Microsoft in 1988, Alpha didn't exist, and neither did OpenVMS. At that point, VMS was still a Vax-only operating system, written in Vax assembly language. Cutler and his team couldn't have taken any of the VMS/Alpha code, since they left DEC before it was written!

Microsoft and DEC settled their lawsuit in 1989 (as indicated above, this was before Alpha product development had even started, much less the OpenVMS port to Alpha), and part of the settlement was that Microsoft agreed to port NT to Alpha, as soon as the latter was ready. In other words, the Alpha port of NT was a result of the DEC/Microsoft lawsuit, not the cause of it.

Most of the problems come from the useless state and federal standards. Get rid of them; all they do is take up space that SHOULD be used to teach stuff that will actually help us one day.

Secondly, schools should not be saying 'our way is the only way'. If a student wants to take advanced courses, and is able, let them for christ's sake.
By shoving the ideal that everyone is intellectually equal down our throats, we lose a lot : the lazy bastards are still lazy bastards, but the ones who could have truly excelled have been brought down to the same level.

Schools really shouldn't be spending thousands of dollars on crappy technology, either. My school district just bought a bunch of HP Thin clients at around 460-480 dollars each. And I could build a similar computer for about 250. Instead of funneling my tax dollars to a computer company as crappy as HP, I think that the money should be put towards teacher's salaries, which, in my district, are supposedly the lowest in the state, but are at least well below the state average Have the a student organization to do the computer work; hell, half the time, me and my friends know more than the people who are getting paid, which is truly pitiful. But, you know, that's the price we pay for 'catching up with the rest of the state'.

Collisions are not a problem on switched networks. Even on older shared media and hub based networks, collisions were not the evil thing that they were portrayed as. Ethernet is not Aloha. See Measured Capacity of an Ethernet: Myths and Reality by David R. Boggs, Jeffrey C. Mogul, Christopher A. Kent. It debunks much of the misinformation that is still prevalent.

I've been using a upgraded RedHat 7.2 for quite a while on a LX164 and DP264. I've been meaning to try Fedora AlphaCore 1.0 (based on Fedora Core 3). See http://www.alphalinux.org/ for download and torrent links.

For Tru64, have you seen the info for the cheap non-commercial version at http://www.tru64unix.compaq.com/noncommercial-unix / ?

The original iMac had a handle.

The G4 iMac was nice when sitting on a desk, but the round base didn't offer much in the way of handholds. The manual actually suggested you lift it by the monitor's support arm. While carrying it, you supported the base with your other hand.

The iMac G5 presents a similar problem: large computer, small "foot." Anyone with two brain cells left could probably move it across the room if he had to, but how do you safely grab and move a $2000 slab-with-hinged-foot?

Naw, for true stupidity, you have to look at this FAQ.

... which is apparently here.

Even going with 130 nm technology (which is already "outdated") can cost a million dollars just for the masks. Yield, packaging, and other issues can easily push up the costs to several times that.

I'm a bit skeptical about that. We run 0.25um stuff here all the time, 5 layer metal, and the mask cost numbers I've heard are in the $100k range for a dedicated production mask. Shuttle costs are well below that (depending if your fab of choice runs shuttles and you can get on them). I just checked MOSIS and it looks like 0.13um on an IBM 8RF process seems to be in the $6k to $50k range for 40 parts (based on die size - assuming I read their numbers correctly).

Now tools on the other hand are a different matter. Layout, synth, and place-and-route tools can be -very- spendy. One could use Magic for layout (I don't know if it supports place and route though).

Package wise I would use some sort of quad flat package for prototypes. BGAs are a pain when it comes time for evaluation - you would need some sort of reflow oven to stick it to the board, and then forget about probing pins.

You might take a look at ESC/Java, which provides "extended static checking" for annotated programs. It's similar in concept to SPARK/Ada, although I'm not sure how well they compare in terms of features.

1. Modprobe/insmod/rmmod.

2. The OpenVMS kernel is written in VAX assembler (http://research.compaq.com/wrl/DECarchives/DTJ/DT J807/DTJ807SC.TXT). It was not written in "languages like" Ada. Jesus christ.

I seem to remember that the Compaq Ipsi (a handheld research prototype that was made before the ipaq by Compaq) had the "Rock&Scroll" interface modality. That was 6-7 years ago.

Compaq IPSI

it always cracks me up when people talk about the technological advancements made by the two key players in the mp3 player industry, when items such as that existed over 5 years ago and smoked the hell out of anything that came out for the next 2 years.

i blame poor marketing on compaq's part... they could have also been a key player. good luck to sony. nowadays (especially in boston) it doesn't matter if the mp3 player had a friggin' time machine in it, if it's not an iPod, people don't want them. because they all want their friends to know that they are COOL and HIP and have enough money to frivolously blow on a "cute white mp3 player".

fuck the iPod. I hope sony can at least dent their market share.

So you're saying that a CISC CPU will actually recompile my code like a hotspot-style JVM? It'll keep track of my execution profile across context switches and reoptimize execution paths based on data acces patterns? Gosh, and all those RISC guys have going for them is branch prediction with speculative execution.

Care to give me an example of a modern CISC CPU with this marvelous ability? Is this one of the Sun MAJC chips? Or is is possible you don't know a JVM from a CPU? Or VLIW from CISC? Your ass from a hole in the ground?

I mean, surely someone as smart as you knows that CISC makes ILP more difficult, which leads to issues with threading latency and bus scheduling on multi-CPU (and now multi-core) systems. I mean, they covered all that in your community college course, right? Personally, I miss CISC CPUs. I remember hand-writing assembler for the VAX-11, now there was an instruction set! What other CPU had a CRC instruction? Or the infamous EDITPC (edit packed character)? Or a single instruction to load a process context? And what modern architecture has the FPD bit for restartable instructions (or restartable instructions, even)? Oh, and I do know what JIT means. I also know that, while PBO has been around for years, no CPU does it: the code has to be specially instrumented and run so that statistics can be generated and the resulting profile applied to a subsequent optimization pass (read: recompile and re-link). Now why don't you go cry to your homeroom teacher and let the big people talk, ok honey?

An accelometer wouldn't sensibly be used to replace the input style / use context of keypads. (Except perhaps in case of accessibility issues and people with disabilities.)

Instead, novel input techniques have been researched for quite a while. Check out these few example publications:

http://sandbox.parc.com/want/papers/mui-cacm-2000. pdf

http://www.csl.sony.co.jp/person/rekimoto/gwrist/

http://www.csl.sony.co.jp/person/rekimoto/tilt/

http://tangible.media.mit.edu/papers/Graspable_Dis plays_CHI97/Graspable_Displays_CHI97.html

http://research.compaq.com/wrl/projects/RocknScrol l/RocknS.html

After one of these radio programs goes to air, HP uses its speech recognition software to create a time-aligned "transcript" of the program and build an index of the words spoken during the program.

When you use SpeechBot, it searches through the shows we have indexed, trying to match your words with those in the index. SpeechBot then displays the matches for your search in order of likely relevance.

To play the program from the current extract for which the detail is displayed, click the PLAY extract button.

The iPod's excellent onboard CPU processing and its excellent controls make it the best-sounding ... of the portable music players.

Where is your justification for this? I notice Apple is very loathe to publish its Signal-to-Noise dB figures for its products.

Personally for best sound when I want a quick blast I like to jack an optical out straight into the nearest amp. iPod lacks this. It's analog output by comparison sounds a bit muddy.

Apple got to the market first and successfully staked out a huge marketshare.

In fact Apple was quite late to market, basically a year behind Creative and Archos for the HD models, and fully two years behind the Compaq/HanGo PJB. Market shares have a weird way of looking huge at the time... until a new entrant carves out a space and/or expands the space. Just as Apple did with the iPod.

The real threat to Apple's continued success is mobile phones. There are already models launched that contain hard drives and play mp3s. Within a few years it will be tough to buy a phone that does *not* bundle this, or lots of RAM or slots for Flash.

Compared with the annual sales of mobile phones, the total sales of mp3 players, iPods included, are a rounding error. The phone makers can even combine with the phone companies to basically give away the devices on long-term credit contracts.

To take just one example, in a few years, when everyone and their dog can get the space equivalent of the iPod Mini in their latest phone for "no money down", what do you think that will do to sales of the iPod Mini? Just as Tivo is being squeezed out by the cable companies, so too Apple could be squeezed out by the phone companies.

It's very impressive and all, but how is this going to benefit me down the line? It's not like they're affordable to small/medium businesses like the Cray or HP's highly valued Alpha DEC workstations.

We are stiffling progress at the lower level by pricing these systems well beyond the reach of the average researcher or multi-national oil conglomerate.

Why is this?

You realize, of course, that should this take off and do well, Compaq will be after you, due to the similarity of the name to iPAQ.

/. posters:
Thanks for all the information for a newbie taking the BSD plunge. This is /. at its best: a lot of people who know what they are talking about and willing to pass on what they know.
BTW, entirely by accident, I found an HP site where you can try out BSD. They are running FreeBSD 5.2.1. You sign up for an account and get to play on their machine. HP puts up the service as a way to show off its high performance systems [alpha's, 64-bit itaniums and other cool tools headed for obsolescence:( ]. I wonder if HP's choice of BSD as one of the OS's for testdriving their hottest boxes implys that they think BSD is less likely to get in the way of demanding computations than some other OS's we shant name.

Comment ends, sig begins :

Compaq _invented_ the hard drive MP3 player. They had their first prototypes in 1997-8, I think. Their marketing folks decided that no one would want one, and they licensed the design off to a Korean company in 1999. You can read about it here and here.

I got mine in early 1999, unit #4. It still does things that the iPod doesn't do, like gapless MP3 playback. It has a superior interface, battery life and sound quality. A shrunken version with an attractive design would have kicked ass.

At any rate, HP bought Compaq, which means that they actually own patents covering almost every aspect of the iPod.

So what does the New HP do? They license the iPod from Apple. Yup, pay Apple for the IP that they own. I'm guessing that the clever MBAs running the company never decided to do a simple patent search.

Thus, HP wins the Dumbest Big Company Ever award. HP's stupidity regarding this matter has been confirmed to me by former employees who will remain nameless.

Jonathan

www.compaq.com

Ok, POSIX is all about the system calls and C library functions. C89 is about compiler support. They are seperate and don't go hand-in-hand.

About POSIX and Unix compatibility. There are a handful of Unixes that remain important and widely deployed. They are:

Solaris
HP-UX
AIX
Linux
*BSD
MacOSX

They pretty much all have modern APIs in recent versions. The older unixes have recently added a bunch of Linux-like modern APIs to make portability easier. This was the reason behind HPUX 11i (the 'i' denotes "internet ready", but what they really mean is glibc/*BSD apis). This is also the reason behind the AIX 5L name (AKA 5.1, 5.2) (L = linux affinity, same deal, new GNU/*BSD apis). You know that MacOSX uses a BSD-based userland, so you're fine there. Then there's Solaris, of which recent versions (>=2.6) are in good shape. Recent versions of the proprietary unixes even have /dev/[u]random and /proc filesystems. There's a lot of common interfaces, as long as you target relatively recent releases.

Ok, once you figure out what platforms you are targeting, you need to figure out what compilers you will support. All of the proprietary Unixes have their own C compiler (sometimes only available for a fee). Many are not fully ANSI compliant. They are definitely not all C99 compliant. That is the bad news.

The good news is that gcc is available for all of the major platforms. This is what gcc excels at, it is highly portable. You can use this to your advantage to get things working on these platforms. If your users then want to get them working with other compilers, that is worth a shot too (non-gcc compilers often produce better optimizations, etc.).. but it will be hit or miss.

Testing. I highly recommend the HP Testdrive program. They make available a bunch of machines with various HP hardware running various operating systems from Linux on Alpha to HPUX on IA64, including Tru64 (aka OSF/1). http://www.testdrive.compaq.com/

Sourceforge also has a build farm which includes Solaris on sparc and x86 and MacOS X. http://sourceforge.net/docman/display_doc.php?doci d=762&group_id=1#platforms You have to be a developer of a sourceforge project to get access, but its a good deal.

Good luck. Hope this helps.
-molo

HPUX Note: Many people think that 11i is for the Itanium platform. That is not the case. 11i is version 11.11 and higher. 11.11 is for HPPA. 11.20 and higher are for IA64. Both are called 11i.

Don't you wish DEC was still alive putting out new versions of the Alpha? More registers. Really good compilers. The best chips (at the time) in the world.
(Just curious; did anyone use this or this? (I do not use Pascal (anymore) or C++.) )

Because PostgreSQL doesn't have PITR, so fails the "Durability" portion of ACID.

I'd never run a mission-critical DB off an RDBMS that isn't fully ACID. Yes, I'm anal that way, but that's what happens after you've worked with a real RDBMS running on a great OS for a while.

...before space travel is monopolized, like every other bloody field out there? It's not a question of "if". It's a question of "when". Monopoly (or quasi-monopoly, e.g. the Coke/Pepsi diopoly) seems to be the new way of doing business.

i read this once or twice a year, just to remind myself how dumb people are.

The best available modern system for formal verification is the Extended Static Checking system for Java developed at DEC SRL. This was developed at DEC before HP shut down that research operation. It's still available as a free download.

What all this machinery does is put teeth into "design by contract". With systems like this, you can tell if a function implements its contract, and you can tell if a caller complies with the contract of each thing they call. Before running the program.

Developing in this mode means spending forever getting rid of the static analysis errors. Then, the program usually just runs. That's exactly what you want for embedded systems. But it's painful for low-grade programming like web site development, where "cosmetic errors" are tolerable and time-to-market matters more than correctness.

"You're forgetting who put all those PCs on the government worker desks. it wasn't some kickasss software a Unix vendor or local open source guru developed.

Was a little company from Redmond."

I realize this is a troll, but I'll bite.

The company that put the PCs on the government workers' desks wasn't from Redmond, it was from San Diego, or Austin, or Houston. All three of these companies started without Microsoft, and all three would still be providing computers to government workers, with or without the Redmond bully. (Oh, and Compaq was started by three guys from Texas Instruments, who wanted to design a computer to run all of IBM's (UNIX) software.)

"You're forgetting who put all those PCs on the government worker desks. it wasn't some kickasss software a Unix vendor or local open source guru developed.

Was a little company from Redmond."

I realize this is a troll, but I'll bite.

The company that put the PCs on the government workers' desks wasn't from Redmond, it was from San Diego, or Austin, or Houston. All three of these companies started without Microsoft, and all three would still be providing computers to government workers, with or without the Redmond bully. (Oh, and Compaq was started by three guys from Texas Instruments, who wanted to design a computer to run all of IBM's (UNIX) software.)

Ethernet works in practice, but allegedly not in theory: some people have sufficiently misunderstood the existing studies of Ethernet performance so as to create a surprisingly resilient mythology. One myth is that an Ethernet is saturated at an offered load of 37%; this is an incorrect reading of the theoretical studies, and is easily disproved in practice. This paper is an attempt to dispel such myths.

...

Figure 10 shows excess delay , a direct measure of inefficiency. It is derived from the delays plotted in figure 8. The ideal time to send one packet and wait for each other host to send one packet is subtracted from the measured time. The time that remains was lost participating in collisions. Notice that it increases linearly with increasing number of hosts (offered load). When 24 hosts each send 1536-byte packets, it takes about 31 milliseconds for each host to send one packet. Theoretically it should take about 30 mSec; the other 1 mSec (about 3%) is collision overhead. Figure 4 agrees, showing a measured efficiency of about 97% for 1536-byte packets and 24 hosts.

Whether wireless will work quite this well, I don't know.

As an enlightened, modern parent, I try to be as involved as possible in the lives of my six children. I encourage them to join team sports. I attend their teen parties with them to ensure no drinking or alcohol is on the premises. I keep a fatherly eye on the CDs they listen to and the shows they watch, the company they keep and the books they read. You could say I'm a model parent. My children have never failed to make me proud, and I can say without the slightest embellishment that I have the finest family in the USA.

Two years ago, my wife Carol and I decided that our children's education would not be complete without some grounding in modern computers. To this end, we bought our children a brand new Compaq to learn with. The kids had a lot of fun using the handful of application programs we'd bought, such as Adobe's Photoshop and Microsoft's Word, and my wife and I were pleased that our gift was received so well. Our son Peter was most entranced by the device, and became quite a pro at surfing the net. When Peter began to spend whole days on the machine, I became concerned, but Carol advised me to calm down, and that it was only a passing phase. I was content to bow to her experience as a mother, until our youngest daughter, Cindy, charged into the living room one night to blurt out: "Peter is a computer hacker!"

As you can imagine, I was amazed. A computer hacker in my own house! I began to monitor my son's habits, to make certain that Cindy wasn't just telling stories, as she is prone to doing at times.

After a few days of investigation, and some research into computer hacking, I confronted Peter with the evidence. I'm afraid to say, this was the only time I have ever been truly disappointed in one of my children. We raised them to be honest and to have integrity, and Peter betrayed the principles we tried to encourage in him, when he refused point blank to admit to his activities. His denials continued for hours, and in the end, I was left with no choice but to ban him from using the computer until he is old enough to be responsible for his actions.

After going through this ordeal with my own family, I was left pondering how I could best help others in similar situations. I'd gained a lot of knowledge over those few days regarding hackers. It's only right that I provide that information to other parents, in the hope t