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But Compaq doesn't intend to market the Itsy at retail. "This research could influence future products, but there are no plans to bring this to market," Frazier said.

but...but...but...apart from being Linux based and running generic PDA functions in savvy style...it plays DOOM!

not sure about the COMPAQ coined "rock and scroll" to describe the navigation through the video game universe by tilting the Itsy forward and back. hello! rock and scroll?

more info on this product tease here. what about a limited edition then eh?

she wore an itsy bitsy teeny weeny...hey i'm rock n' scrolling!

For some reason the link in the CNET story ("Compaq says the kernel for Itsy is freely available") leads to some sort of slideshow. Check out this page instead.
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For some reason the link in the CNET story ("Compaq says the kernel for Itsy is freely available") leads to some sort of slideshow. Check out this page instead.
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"...The Itsy Pocket Computer is a small handheld computer based on the low-power, high-performance StrongARM SA-1100 microprocessor. Our current prototype runs at 200MHz on a pair of AAA batteries, and sports a tiny, high-resolution LCD touchscreen, a high-quality audio codec, and up to 64MB of memory. Itsy is designed to be an open platform for research projects ranging from OS power management to novel gesture and speech-based user interfaces. The base Itsy hardware provides a flexible interface for adding a custom daughtercard, enabling a wide range of hardware projects such as wireless networking and GPS. Itsy also supports the Linux OS and standard GNU tools, facilitating the development of both kernel and application software, as well as ports of existing packages such as Apache...." source

seems some info about the itsy is here....

"...The Itsy Pocket Computer is a small handheld computer based on the low-power, high-performance StrongARM SA-1100 microprocessor. Our current prototype runs at 200MHz on a pair of AAA batteries, and sports a tiny, high-resolution LCD touchscreen, a high-quality audio codec, and up to 64MB of memory. Itsy is designed to be an open platform for research projects ranging from OS power management to novel gesture and speech-based user interfaces. The base Itsy hardware provides a flexible interface for adding a custom daughtercard, enabling a wide range of hardware projects such as wireless networking and GPS. Itsy also supports the Linux OS and standard GNU tools, facilitating the development of both kernel and application software, as well as ports of existing packages such as Apache...." source

seems some info about the itsy is here....

When I was living in Palo Alto last year they had a fiber to the home trial. Not enough people signed up so the whole thing was scrapped. I see at their web site that they are doing it again. Better luck this time. One thing that was promising about the Palo Alto fiber loop is that it runs right through the Digital Internet Exchange. This way the bandwidth could be available to support the 100Mbps data service.

Guys - honestly. As far as I know, Salem was just a machine assembly plant - Comapq probably has 10 of them, and they want to start centralizing. The acutal Alpha chip is still made, by Intel, no less, at a large plant in the suburbs of boston. Check out http://www.unix.digital.com/ sometime. Compaq is betting on the Alpha bigtime - they want to fill the enterprise with ProLiant's and AlphaServers. They are also betting on Tru64 UNIX (read: Was Digital UNIX) big time. Compaq is just trying to save a couple bucks while firing up for the big game.

In which case, the complaint would be justified.

Solaris has auditing and ACL's for 'Trusted Solaris', though I have not (yet) used it. This is how one obtains B1 security for Solaris.

VMS has done auditing correctly for a long time. It has made my job much, much easier.

Click here for Sec urity Event Classes that can be audited/alarmed. (It wouldn't hurt to read the whole Security auditing section. The ANALYZE/AUDIT tool is very nice.)

It is also good to have hardware-level events logged. A couple of years ago I had a VAX crash. I simply did ANALYZE/ERROR/SINCE=TODAY and found out I had a SIMM that was having ECC/parity errors. Since it logged the bank of memory with the failure I knew exactly which SIMM. I called the DEC service guy, he came out, and we switched it out during lunch. No one noticed.

Yes, Linux could use these things.

If Compaq cares about Linux, why are they letting em86 (the program that runs x86 binaries on Alpha) flounder? I notice that they recently removed it from their Alpha Migration Tools page (http://www.digital.com/amt/), too. Because of this, em86 has been languishing. It can't run a modern Netscape without crashing quickly, it can't run libc6 programs very well, etc. Whereas their FX!32 program for NT is being kept very well up-to-date (and always was better than em86 anyway).

I still want an Itsy.

... check out this bad boy...

Actually, the 21264 was just released, the 21364 has been underway for a while, and if I understand how things work, the 21264 team has started on the 21464.

For info on the 21364, look at this presentation.

Compaq appears to intend for the Alpha to be a competitor to Merced, and there's no reason to think that it won't be considerably faster. They're also going to migrate their Tandem customers over to Alpha (from MIPS).

The horror! The horror! :)

Itsy isn't wearable, but it already offers speech recognition, and some enterprising soul already ported Doom to it. Not a commercial product, though.

Overall it depends on the application. GCC is not that bad on Alpha integer. The performance loss is mostly in floating point and math libraries.

This shouldn't be true for much longer. Compaq released their math library for the Alpha last week (see here for details), and, acording to posts to comp.lang.fortan they will be releasing their Fortran compiler as well (as a commercial product, not for free). This should make Alphas much more appealing for cluster use.

-jason

I bet this would allow you to do something like Itsy's Ro ck 'n' Scroll.

I bet this would allow you to do something like Itsy's Ro ck 'n' Scroll.

Disclaimer: This is not an official press release of Compaq Corp, and Compaq is not at all responsible for its content.

Hi folks --

As one of the engineers responsible for helping put together the AltaVista.de site mentioned in this article, I figured I'd clear up some of the confusion.

Yes, indeed the servers are running Linux, more specifically Red Hat 5.2. We are using kernel 2.0.36 rather than 2.2.x because we needed a stable platform which has been out long enough to be thoroughly tested.

There is a very good reason why the machines are appearing and disappearing at different times you go to test them. The site is still in BETA stage; it still has not officially been opened to the public, and is still undergoing stress testing and modifications internally. The site will not go "live" until it has the same dependability as the AltaVista.com site in Palo Alto.

The AltaVista.de site uses a combination of technologies... currently, the Linux part of it handles Web serving only, while the crawling and indexing is still being done on Tru64 Unix (AKA Digital Unix). Pending further testing, the site is scheduled to switch over to a pure Linux solution based around our AltaVista Search Intranet product within the next few months.

Our "Intranet" product is a superset, rather than a subset of the Palo Alto site's technology. It runs on many platforms, handles many different filetypes rather than just HTML, and scales cleanly and efficiently from a departmental server to the global scope of the AltaVista.com site. It is packaged up cleanly to make for easy installation, customization, and maintanance, and is available at reasonable prices for your company today. Of important note for you Slashheads is the fact that version 2.3a which just went to press last week is free (although not open source) for indexes of up to 3000 documents.

Anyway, just thought the community deserved to know what was going on in the world of AltaVista.

Div.

(Yes, I'm posting as an A.C. because I've forgotten my password again, dangit.)

Reminds me of the article I read here... went searching back on it... and here it is .
The most interesting is the link to Compaq's itsy .
Somrthing that has small multimedia capabilities... could be used as a digital picture viewer with some sound...
Maybe they were looking to put Be on it?

Magic 6.4 is also evidently out for Linux, for those aspiring up and coming hardware designers among the Chic Geek crowd!

Check out the link below for more info...

Magic for Linux, BSD, etc.

Twinkie

On their feedback page, the written email address (unix-webmaster@compaq.com) is wrong -- messages bounce. However the feedback mailto: link (unix-webmaster@digital.com) seems to work -- no reply yet, but no bounce either.

Alpha Roadmap
This is a slide from the presentation made at last years microprocessor conference (whatever that thing is called). The 21164 max's out at 533 on .25 micron and gets 600 with .28. The 21264 on .28 should reach 750MHz by mid-1999 and it should reach 1GHz on .18 in the 2H-1999. Of course the big one, the 21364 (EV7 core), will be out 1H 2000, probably around the same time as Merced is expected and the 21364 *starts* at 1Gz, but then again once your running that fast, speed doesn't mean so much anymore, we'll all be looking at the piplining aspects and other architectural improvements of the NG processors when comparing performance rather than just look at fast it's clockspeed is...