Slashdot Mirror

HP still sells Alphas. Actually though I think DEC damaged Alphas with poor marketing, and a shitty interpretor, FX!32.

Mickeysoft is just giving them some headroom, you think, they ain't on a leash?

No, I don't think HP is on MS's leash. MS got away with playing hardball during the Bush years, the Clinton Department of Justice had them on the ropes, but they can't count on being able to continue. MS also still has the EU hanging over them.

Not that I don't wish they wouldn't try to play hardball aqain, I supported the original judge's verdict and believe MS should have been broken up into 2 if not 3 different businesses. If MS did maybe they would broken up.

Falcon

I see Dell's OEM prices going up, or HP (those loyal chaps), Acer and Lenovo going down.

With a market cap of more than $27 Billion and second only to HP in world wide market share Dell may be too big for Microsoft to effectively threaten. And as for HP, they have supported Linux and Unix for years, they work with Suse, Redhat, the old DEC's Tru64 as well as HP's own HP-UX.

I bet a lot of people here will be happy getting rid of their x86s.

Yea, I imagine some are like this. As for me what counts is cost and speed. Oh, and support.

Falcon

I see Dell's OEM prices going up, or HP (those loyal chaps), Acer and Lenovo going down.

With a market cap of more than $27 Billion and second only to HP in world wide market share Dell may be too big for Microsoft to effectively threaten. And as for HP, they have supported Linux and Unix for years, they work with Suse, Redhat, the old DEC's Tru64 as well as HP's own HP-UX.

I bet a lot of people here will be happy getting rid of their x86s.

Yea, I imagine some are like this. As for me what counts is cost and speed. Oh, and support.

Falcon

I see Dell's OEM prices going up, or HP (those loyal chaps), Acer and Lenovo going down.

With a market cap of more than $27 Billion and second only to HP in world wide market share Dell may be too big for Microsoft to effectively threaten. And as for HP, they have supported Linux and Unix for years, they work with Suse, Redhat, the old DEC's Tru64 as well as HP's own HP-UX.

I bet a lot of people here will be happy getting rid of their x86s.

Yea, I imagine some are like this. As for me what counts is cost and speed. Oh, and support.

Falcon

I see Dell's OEM prices going up, or HP (those loyal chaps), Acer and Lenovo going down.

With a market cap of more than $27 Billion and second only to HP in world wide market share Dell may be too big for Microsoft to effectively threaten. And as for HP, they have supported Linux and Unix for years, they work with Suse, Redhat, the old DEC's Tru64 as well as HP's own HP-UX.

I bet a lot of people here will be happy getting rid of their x86s.

Yea, I imagine some are like this. As for me what counts is cost and speed. Oh, and support.

Falcon

You are not looking hard enough. Please check at least the last link.

Correct me if I'm wrong but a single address operating system with a JIT VM within the kernel could be *faster* due to static compilation before into some sort of bytecode / machine code and than the VM can simply optimize depending on how the program is executing, something like HP's Dynamo http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/1999/HPL-1999-78.html

From the examples shown in the .PDF it seems that it is once again a case of a quick fix that only works on low-res and low detail photos, preferably in single color.

And for it to work at all, you would need a 2-lamp scanner.
Which are standard, but in high-quality print studios and other places that would do this kind of retouching by hand anyway in order to preserve or achieve better quality of the final product.

I didn't look at individual pricing, but the AMD Turion Neo X2 L625 is alread being offered in a laptop from HP - listed at a base of $569.99 but the processor is a $75 upgrade... or so you think, as soon as you select it you are told you need to upgrade the video card as well!

Either way, they wasted no time getting this on the market. The price seems competetive with the Intel Atom model.

I'm sure it's just a matter of time before Intel one-ups them though.

The problem is the "features" you are touting are the crap nobody wants unless they want to wag their epeen! For example DDR3-total crap. The latency on DDR3 is complete shit. The ONLY way that DDR3 is worth the extra lag is if you stuff the living hell out of a machine with enough of it to make up for the lousy latency. Less than 8Gb? Crap.

-This on the other hand is complete and total overkill for 99.995% of the home and business users. of this I know because many of my customers are happy to let me run performance counters for a week or two to allow me to "tune" the performance after the sale. Most aren't even hitting 1.5Gb or 12% CPU on machine with a LOT less power than the one at that link. In fact my biggest sellers are the lowest Core 2 Dous on the laptops and the AMD 7550 on the desktop and I have yet to see a customer get above 20% utilization for any length of time.

Let me ask YOU a question: If Apple is such a "good value" then why do YOU think company after company after company keep coming out with HAckentoshes" huh? Allow me to answer that. It is because with Apple you have shitty (Mac Mini) or total overkill (Mac Pro) and pretty much nada in between. Same with their laptops. You got the shitty $1000 model and the decent ones are all over $2200. Did you look at the price of the "total overkill" laptop? It is a grand total of $1379 and completely stomps anything Apple has for less than $2400. That is a full $1000 difference. Pretty big difference,huh?

Look, if you want to spend crazy money on a shiny, that is your business. Nobody is judging you for it. But I can sell a laptop for less than $1000 that will doo all that my customers can ever ask for and then some. And of course we both know that Apple doesn't even make desktops, as the Mini is a bad joke filled with laptop parts and the next desktop is ....what? $2400+? Meanwhile I just sold a client a really nice quad core for $750, and that is with me making nearly $200 on the build!

But you can read for yourself here and here that I am not the only one who thinks Apple is like Ferrari-nice and pretty and expensive. Do you see doctors going around saying their Hummer H3 is a "good value for the money"? Or their trophy wife saying that Lincoln Navigator is "a good value"? NO! So be happy with your expensive status symbol and enjoy it. Meanwhile my customers and the other 90% of the US population that don't have a couple of grand burning a hole in their pocket will get really nice Intel and AMD (how is that AMD Apple doing you? Oh yeah, you don't get a choice there either) crotch rockets for cheap. And yes, they will last much longer than most folks actually want to use them for, as the 1.1GHz Celeron HP Pavilion I'm typing this on, or the whole damned closet full of under 3GHz desktops can attest.

This is printing so 'works' and 'easy' are rare.

It sucks that manufacturers don't really make printer drivers for a lot of high-end equipment for Linux

On the flipside, if the printer is attached to an HP Jetdirect box, you only need to setup a network printer and have the custom paper type outputted to Postscript to print whatever you want, including labels.

Some of the nice Intermec and Datamax label printers work varying well. Some will take Postscript encoded as ASCII directly over whatever interface they have, sometimes Adapters are needed.

The expensive printers are meant for big industrial printjobs, though. You are more likely to find Oracle printer drivers (really just paper types) for them than Microsoft / Open Office support.

Nice try. I see nothing in your link but base model prices with inferior hardware. Bump them up to be comparable to a Mac, and the prices are the same or even more than an Apple.

Starting at: $ 1,249.00* - The first two for instance has a slower base processor, 800 Mhz DDR2 memory not 1066 Mhz DDR 3, no Wireless N, and shared memory for graphics for the first two cheapest ones ($1249 and $1479). Did you even browse the hardware for the link you posted?

These are the pre-configured models that are at least a bit closer to Apples hardware. Note that the second one (a 15" model) is comparable to an Apple Macbook Pro (15"), although it has less ram (2GB of DDR2 instead of 4 GB of DDR3 that comes on a Mac). It's $2,149 which is actually more than a comparable Apple. This is directly from the link you posted. The sub $1000 notebooks listed are barely above a netbooks with 12" displays, cheap integrated sub-par graphics, and DDR2 again.

Geez, just begging for it, ain't ya? Well here you go. And notice the top o' the line business elite notebooks come with nicer gear than the $2400 Apple machine at around $1200 cheaper, fully loaded. We're talking 8Gb of DDR3, dual discrete/onboard GPU setup, nice fat HDD, ULV Intel Core 2, etc. That took all of 7 seconds with teh Google, but you knew that didn't you?

Why do you keep punishing yourself? Is there some deep seated desire to prove that you didn't blow huge gobs of money, or what? Why is it so hard for you to accept they are expensive? You can sit here and jump through logic hoops for the next 100 years, it will never change reality. Apple is expensive and gives you limited choice. That is the price that you and the other "Apple elite" are willing to pay for OSX. Nobody cares, nobody is looking down on you for your decision. Just accept it, be happy that you have that kind of cash to blow in this economy, and move on. Otherwise it is just......well it is kinda sad.

It is like those Linux guys that will come up with "gems" like "sudo is JUST as easy as runas, because it is more powerful than a GUI!". But of course we all know it isn't, because Joe average doesn't give a flying fart about "the power of CLI" and just thinks CLI is a royal PITA, and I have to agree. Just as trying to prove to Joe average that a $2200 Apple provides him a good deal like that $800 HP does is just nuts. While there are many nice things about Apple, price just ain't one of them. Accept and move on dude.

You forgot threads (and the memory model needed for that, see e.g. http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Hans_Boehm/c++mm/). Very difficult task to do well, that is why most languages to not even attempt.

Some others worth to consider are libraries (XML, etc.), documentation (Java has good, others have/are catching up), Javadoc and perhaps even support for things like UML, ctags, etc.

True about Memory model, granted. Libraries, definitely *not*. Libraries should exists independently of the language, so that they can be replaced if they suck (see Java for an example of how bad it can get). I don't regard this as *critical*, though, as library implementations are passable.

You forgot threads (and the memory model needed for that, see e.g. http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Hans_Boehm/c++mm/). Very difficult task to do well, that is why most languages to not even attempt.

Some others worth to consider are libraries (XML, etc.), documentation (Java has good, others have/are catching up), Javadoc and perhaps even support for things like UML, ctags, etc.

Threads.

C99 has no concept of a memory model (C++ committee is thinking about it and will probably end up in something better than in Java due to hindsight).

POSIX threads definitely are not pert of C99 and whether it defines the memory model well enough is up to debate, it does not for C++.
http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Hans_Boehm/c++mm/

Disclaimer: I am in no way associated with the following companies and/or any of its representativs or employees. I am merely an very very satisfied customer.

If you don't want to build your own system you could consider buying a prebuilt system. It saves you a ton of trouble, lowers your electrical bill, reduces your carbon footprint, and has cool features that are hard to get right in a homebuilt system (such as small size, passive cooling, hot-swap bays or wall-mount kits).

I researched the market for prebuilt WHS servers and ended up with a Tranquil SQA-5H (see http://tranquilpc.co.uk/ for the full product range) and it is probably the best piece of computer hardware I have ever purchased. Room for 5 harddrives, easy to work with, and the machine itself uses only 29 W.

Similar products are available from HP (check out http://www.hp.com/united-states/campaigns/mediasmart-server/) and a lot of other vendors (like Acer, Velocity Micro, Niveus). They are all available under the "Buy" tab of the Windows Home Server website: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/windowshomeserver/default.mspx

- Jesper

there are only 2 other major OS makers who are publicly traded, that are in competition to RH

HPQ HP-UX
ORCL Solaris
IBM AIX
NOVL SUSE

Looks like Red Hat has plenty of competition. Red Hat's business performance selling support services for their distribution of linux has been outstanding and their inclusion in the S&P 500 is well deserved.

I'll bite, you troll.

A Dell eight 2.26GHz, 6GB of RAM, a 512MB video card, and a 500GB hard drive is $3,157. That's $142 less than a Mac Pro with the same specs (though the Mac has a hard drive with 140GB more space). $142 less - for a Dell.

Try to build an eight-core HP for less than $4,000. Good luck!

I'll bite: HP Z600 Linux Workstation

~$2000 when you add the second CPU. Maybe another $100-$200 if you want Windows

Granted, I didn't configure all of your fancy 6GB of RAM and other silliness :)

Suprisingly it seems that HP still makes a good 3 button optical mouse. http://h30094.www3.hp.com/product.asp?sku=2545791&pagemode=ca

Actually I was thinking 8 of the MDS600 full of 2TB drives in 40U but whatever. The Sunfire box looks nice too. A Petabyte-a-rack it is. That's a lot of data.

Try opening a newlined file with notepad, for example.

Gedit on my Ubuntu laptop saves with LF newlines, and Windows Notepad can't read them because it expects CRLF newlines. But I add one to Notepad and all is well. In fact, pretty much every text editor but Windows Notepad can handle the differences between UNIX and Windows.

As for VMS, how much VMS is used in world-facing applications as of June 2009? Even HP, the owner of copyright in VMS after having bought Digital's parent company, uses HP-UX, Linux, or Windows Server on its popular public websites. Even HP's site about VMS was found to use HP-UX. Netcraft confirms it: VMS is dead.

And if FTP translates oddball operating systems' conventions for text/plain files, why doesn't it do so for image files (.ppm vs. .bmp), audio files (.au vs. .wav), or other MIME types?

Canon also doesn't try and install a direct pipeline to your bank account with printer ink cartridges either.

Contrast this with HP who gives you "starter" ink cartridges for their $50 printer then gouges you for 30-80% the cost of the printer for ink (30% for black, 82% for color). HP is also the company behind the infamous printer ink costing more than human blood fiasco.

So Canon is being the good guy in two separate markets. Go Canon!

Canon also doesn't try and install a direct pipeline to your bank account with printer ink cartridges either.

Contrast this with HP who gives you "starter" ink cartridges for their $50 printer then gouges you for 30-80% the cost of the printer for ink (30% for black, 82% for color). HP is also the company behind the infamous printer ink costing more than human blood fiasco.

So Canon is being the good guy in two separate markets. Go Canon!

The product page is here. There are pictures. And specifications. And video. I think we can skip the rest of the blogofrenzy and get our info from the source.

BTW, this looks pretty much like a DL1000 installed backward. It's probably different in some other meaningful way. I didn't look too close.

Everybody's coming with the 1/2 width 1U servers now. HP has quite a few of them. They're more dense even than HP blades, and they use standard interconnects.

The recently announced DL1000 is another one, with the connections in the back as is traditional, and up to 16 SAS drives.

It is a cool look when your datacenter doubles as a social gathering place. I've done it too. Not so cool when somebody falls into a server, the cat decides to play with the CPU fan, that sort of thing. Definitely want to go with the non conductive remote control helecopter.

I heard Google started with restaurant racks or something like that.

Oh. And the direct from the source link is go extremescale

Threads Cannot be Implemented as a Library. That means pthreads is bad. Read: http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2004/HPL-2004-209.pdf

Then after a few years, work on Java memory model has found a good solution. Read: Foundations of the C++ concurrency memory model [based on the Java memory model] http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2008/HPL-2008-56.pdf

How fugly can this be for all you C++ wannabe fanguys??? (Phun intended!)

Threads Cannot be Implemented as a Library. That means pthreads is bad. Read: http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2004/HPL-2004-209.pdf

Then after a few years, work on Java memory model has found a good solution. Read: Foundations of the C++ concurrency memory model [based on the Java memory model] http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2008/HPL-2008-56.pdf

How fugly can this be for all you C++ wannabe fanguys??? (Phun intended!)

I think it is hubris - the idea that "I'm smarter than everyone else in the industry, and I have ideas that none of them do".

Wow. Hubris? Really?

There is a long history of people doing stuff they personally find cool and interesting and succeeding wildly at it. Sure there are also a lot of failures, but you cannot succeed without taking risks, and it is pretty pathetic to see that your lame attitude is so prevalent these days.

This web tablet may fail terribly, or it might succeed wildly, but thank Dog there are still people willing to try.

More RAM isn't a big deal - the 5500 series from everybody else goes up to 172GB now, and will be at least double that soon. That's plenty for now.

The density is only 1/4th that of HP's new DL1000 (video).

Interconnect is what gives these Cisco servers their shine.

It would be nice to see some sort of virtual SAN integrated into the VMs

Something like this you mean? Turns the local storage on any VMware host into part of a full-featured, clustered, iSCSI SAN. Not cheap though (about $2500 per TB)

Plus, I don't know of any brand of monitor that comes with a HDMI input.

Never heard of HP, Gateway, or LG?

The way you put it sounds disheartening.

But maybe, just maybe, netbooks could be that proverbial Troyan horse.

And guess what: HP is already trying.

Let's see how it goes

In non-gc languages such as C

It should be noted, however, that there are mark & sweep garbage collectors available for C/C++. By far the most popular one is Boehm-Demers-Weiser GC.

While you could very well go about manually documenting every piece of the network, and hope it remains relevant and up to date in the future, this could take weeks and add significant overhead to your role in keeping current. I recommend looking into the many auto-discovery tools available from vendors like HP, BMC, Computer Associates, etc... They aim to store everything in a single database (CMDB) and track any changes or additions by scheduling delta-discoveries whenever you deem fit. The initial setup can be a lot of work, but since you know most of the information required by the auto-discovery tools for accessing system information (usernames, passwords, IP subnets, common services, ports...), it should be pretty straight forward for you. In a larger organization where this information is spread around various groups, it can be a lot more challenging.

HP has a product, formerly by a company called Mercury, that I find works quite well. It would at least be a good place to start looking... Link here. Good luck!

So, System|Preferences|Network Connections (there's no "Network Configuration" item), | Mobile Broadband, Add, "Era" (it's my provider). Insert dongle, pick "modem" function on the phone, select IRDA as method of connection, Activate, place facing the dongle.

What next? 'Cause nothing happens, and the Network Applet doesn't display any new options?

I've never done this and, unfortunately, it does not seem like there is a convenient GUI yet. However, from what I gather there are two steps: 1) get your IR dongle to communicate with the IrDA stack and 2) configure PPP over IrDA.

It sounds like you have the first step already done. I don't know what kind of hardware you have, but you can follow the steps here (scroll about midway down) to make sure it works with IrDA. The two potential hangups I can see are a conflict with the serial port (see the notes on FIR mode) or a conflict with the ir-usb driver (see the notes on dongles). In both cases it may seem like the hardware is ok (ie: you will see a device entry), but attempts to communicate with the hardware will fail. You may need to blacklist the relevant drivers if they are problematic.

Once you know the IR hardware is working properly, you should be able to use NetworkManager to configure the ppp connection. If that doesn't work, you can try gnome-ppp. This is where you "modprobe irnet" and use /dev/irnet as your device.

I'm guessing you have a USB dongle, so try this and see what happens:
> rmmod ir-usb
> modprobe irda-usb
> plug in dongle, monitor dmesg output
> irattach irda0 -s
> modprobe irnet
> gnome-ppp

I agree this is an area that needs some work in Ubuntu.

It disables network connection over WiFi. The card remains switched on, the blue LED is lit, the card continues to draw battery. I can launch Kismet for example and it will work just fine.

I've never heard of this before. Which script are you running and how?

It's not that volume control doesn't work. It's the mute key on the keyboard that doesn't.

This should work, but maybe the keybindings aren't setup with the right keycodes. Try System|Preferences|Keyboard Shortcuts first. If that doesn't work, have a look at this to troubleshoot it.

Just out of curiosity...did you install from scratch or upgrade? Do you have the package eeepc-acpi-scripts installed?

Now there's no mouse cursor, the system doesn't react to keystrokes, it won't even switch to console (ctrl-alt-F1).

I don't know what the problem is. Have you tried Ekiga? You can also try running Cheese in a terminal to see if it gives you an error message of some kind.

It's an interesting point you make.
Currently it's worth avoiding netbooks that have the following hardware:

1. Intel GMA500 aka Poulsbo graphics chipsets. There is no FOSS driver for these. That's because there's a PowerVR core in them. The Fedora Project's Adam Williamson seems to have found some partial drivers hidden away in a quiet little Ubuntu repository where they were dumped by the Intel team. But success seems partial. So for now avoid anything with GMA500.

2. Broadcom wireless. Again avoid these Broadcom 4322 like the fscking plague. Dan Williams (again a Red Hat / Fedora person) has a fairly scathing take on them based on his experiences of trying to get suspend/resume and wireless to work consistently.

3. Elantech touchpads. Bastien Nocera (what is it with all those Red Hat people, don't they like closed-source binary drivers?) may have had some success at wringing some code out of Ubuntu and Intel people to share with the rest of us, but it still seems uncertain.

4. CPU. The Intel Z-series draw less power than the N-series apparently.

5. RAM expansion. Lots of the netbooks have a single, soldered slot. So if you like being stuck with 1GB of RAM while you try to run OpenOffice.org-3 then go ahead, have fun.

So, the bottom line is that the Dell Mini 10v might be OK as regards the graphics (it's GMA950) which in turn means that it doesn't do HDMI and has an unfortunately lower vertical resolution than the Mini10v, but the wireless sucks and the touchpad probably sucks, the RAM is fixed too low.

Looking at the HP Mini 1000s its difficult to tell what wireless they use. Graphics are GMA950 unlike the older HP2133 which used Chrome9 graphics chipsets for which VIA has failed to release FOSS drivers.

Seems like a lot of the netbook producers (even those such as Intel, Dell and Ubuntu that pay lipservice to "Open Source") are having a hard time being honest and straightforward with us.

My wife and my son shop at WalMart. No, they don't spend 200 bucks on printers. There is a printer sitting in my kitchen which is connected to a Ubuntu machine. Let me pick my dead arse up, and see what brand it is - be right back.

HP Deskjet f4325 $45 at Walmart http://www.walmart.com/catalog/product.do?product_id=10710285

I'm pretty sure that the printer was plug and play because they brought it in the house, and within an hour, it was connected, and running. We'll assume that the kid did his homework before going to the store with his mother, and he KNEW that it would work. A quick google for HP Linux drivers takes me to http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?docname=bpu00658&cc=us&lc=en&dlc=en&product=3571316 where I click another link http://hplipopensource.com/hplip-web/index.html

Oh, looky, I spent less than 5 minutes duplicating my son's work!!

I would assume that having spent several hours, or perhaps a week or two, developing that dream machine, you would have already identified those printers that will work with your machine. Further, I would assume that you informed YOUR customer of your findings, so that he wouldn't waste time and money on a printer that will not work. Actually, I would assume that you ASKED THE CUSTOMER if he wanted to use a printer, and offered to SELL HIM a compatible printer, thereby saving him a trip to Walmart.

Sorry, your argument carries no weight. Just 'fess up that you are incapable of designing a "dream machine", and you are further incapable of supporting that dream machine.

Apparently, my son could do it. I'll have to consider putting him into business.......

G! might be the savior you are looking for ...

Apple and I hope G! will release their mobile OSes onto a netbook sometime by the end of this year.
I'd kinda lean towards Apple though --
<my2cents alt="That's gonna get me killed on /.">thanks to the bsd fanboi in me</my2cents>

Though in all fairness, I think HP tried -- at least from a netbook perspective - their Mini Mi is based on Ubuntu. Its not bad, a bit rough, will get better w/ time but I think the biggest problem is the lack of apps -- read something similar to the Apps on G1/iPhone. Add that and throw in touch screen support, and you have a viable alternative.

I don't know what both you and the original question asker are talking about.

I just went onto Dell's website and looked at the first range of laptops that I would ever consider for myself and NONE of the models have webcams? Why?

Because I selected 'Enterprise / Corporate' on the first page and not 'Home - give-me-all-your-crap-that-only-the-children-would-use'. :)

Come to think of it, I've only ever owned one laptop with a webcam, that that was back in the day (>5 years ago) when the only way to get a decent 3d card in a laptop was to go for the home models, since then none of my laptops have them simply because when I buy a laptop I want one designed to work, not look good, etc.

See:
Dell Examples

HP Examples

BTW, pretty much any business model laptop will include a model without webcam, for the exact reason raised by the original questioner.

The point of the coolthreads servers aren't to go core to core with other CPUs. The strength of those systems is the number of cores you can get in a single system. A T5440 supports 4 T2 Plus prcoessors which gives you 32 cores.

And even with the "32 cores", the Niagara was beaten out by cheaper x86 servers.

http://h71028.www7.hp.com/ERC/cache/280124-0-0-0-121.html

Sun basically killed themselves by canceling the Sparc line. They never ramped the clocks on cores, and the multi-threaded model that they designed towards was a fringe case at best.

Did anyone mention HP POD, appears to be an off-the-shelf containerised server farm like Google's except that you can buy them - http://www.hp.com/go/pod.

One big shelf, electric and cold water.

You did not try to print Chinese, did you.

I've been doing strange character sets in Unix for 20 years. I have the old CJKV which goes into quite a bit of detail about ghostscript producing PDF CFF 1.2 (Chinese). Unix has had this for a long time (well before Windows) and Linux (which is international) inherited from Unix. Seriously this is a non issue if you do things the Unix way.

In fact I would assert this is a strength of Linux. Windows (with its very broken) Unicode fonts unperforms here. Heck Linux (TeX) actually is taking on Hindi which is much much worse than Chinese.

This far I've been told "in extremely cheap machine Linux would make more sense" and "buy more expensive peripherals". Wow.

The Unix on the low end makes sense with things like XFCE or ROX. But you need to be choosing all your hardware to work with Linux. The cheapest color laser HP sells is fully PCL compliant. I wish OEMs would stop up to the plate with all hardware, but they haven't so you have to be a little careful.

OEM's cannot compile for the distributions as every minor-minor (security patch) version *requires* different binary.
The binary on the CD which comes along the peripheral would certainly not work on any up-to-date distribution.
Good? No. Acceptable? IMNSHO no. Preferable? Kernel developers think so.

You are missing the point. You should be getting your computer, your distribution and your DVB card from your OEM. They roll out the security patches to you.
 

I bought grandma this HP printer this weekend to go with her Ubuntu upgrade. I knew it worked with Linux because it's HP, but went through the steps anyway. Plug it in, turn it on. It was recognized right away. Test print a PDF. There on the menu was "print both sides" so I took it. Flawless the first time. I didn't even know the printer did duplex when I bought it, so this was a nice surprise.

What's wrong with Windows that they can't even get this right?

I also have to admit that the OS plays a role in my judgement. OSX just works better than Linux + KDE4, especially in portability between networks.

Personal preference aside, OS is determined by the software, very few high end enterprise packages use OS X. ArcGIS is Windows only, several other GIS and renderers are Windows/Linux or Linux only. So if I buy Mac Pro's, I still need to get Windows licenses and test all the Linux drivers myself.

Apple doesn't offer on-site repairs, that's very true, but I haven't worked in a company that took advantage of any of that. My current company has a few hundred Lenovo laptops, we don't get Lenovo to come fix them, we send them back and get a repair. Same thing with the HP workstations at my last company of roughly 1300 users. I don't know why they don't get on-site repairs, but they don't.

I can negotiate with our Levono and Dell suppliers as a company of less then 100 staff. Dell will give me A$200 straight off the top of a A$3000 PC, more if I order in Bulk but the Lenovo reseller requires me to order 5 or more to get any decent discount. If your work hasn't got a support agreement, its the fault of whoever was doing the contract negotiation with the supplier, we get on-site support from Dell and Levono (I'm assuming that you are in or near a major city) support is a big thing when doing bulk supply negotiations as it normally is one of the larger line items.

When working with a company of more then 250 people, live spares are always kept (by the sounds of it you don't work in the support/systems administration area, not an accusation its just an observation). Also a lot of basic repairs are done by local IT staff (this often is part of the support agreement) whilst collect and return agreements are used for critical problems (at this point the machine is basically replaced with a new one).

I *just* bought an HP HDX-18.
* Windows Vista Home Premium with Service Pack 1
* Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad Processor Q9100 (2.26 GHz)
* 4GB DDR3 System Memory (2 Dimm)
* 1GB Nvidia GeForce GT 130M
* 500GB 5400RPM SATA Hard Drive with HP ProtectSmart Hard Drive Protection
* 18.4" diagonal High Definition HP Ultra BrightView Infinity Display (1920x1080p)
* Blu-Ray +/-R/RW with SuperMulti

The Vista experience meter gives it a *THREE POINT EIGHT* on the usability scale.
If this less-than-a-year-old, Quad-core 2.26GHz, 4Gb System RAM, 1Gb VRAM, 5400RPM SATA HD system can't rate better than that, then why bother with Vista at all?
I sure as hell didn't.
I swapped the original drive for another 500Gb 5400 RPM SATA drive, installed Ubuntu, and haven't looked back.

YES I tweaked Vista to run better, I spent two days doing exactly that, and it really, honestly didn't make enough of a difference.
I shouldn't have to turn off half the OS in order to make a machine (especially one with specs like this) run like it's supposed to.

What do you mean you're with HP? They have a whole campaign devoted to desktop touch screens...

As for most of the other blatantly wrong comments, I think it's incredibly important to develop this. Everyone is only considering touch screens as the main outputs. But what about a dedicated input being a touch screen. Like the Optimus Maximums, but extremely cheaper and more diverse. This one application voids both this post and this post, the two highest rated comments in this thread. There are so many applications to multi-touch technology, and only R&D will get us there.

Try not to speak authoritatively about things you clearly know nothing about:

http://www.rungeek.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/taskmanager2.jpg

And if you want detail:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc768048.aspx

The "poor utilization" in the article is a relative term. For most apps running under Windows, scalability to multiple CPUs is not hampered by the kernel. There have been improvements to I/O and networking on many-CPU servers, but it's just a fine tuning, not a massive leap forward.

600% scalability on 8 CPUs - this is SQL 7 on NT4 mind you!
http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/servers/technology/images/performancepreview-chart1.gif

Is that a nice linear scalability graph of a Windows application I see?
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_oGCeAi-2i3Q/RuWC4LFEeQI/AAAAAAAAAD0/7B6g8tYUVac/s1600-h/BarcaWinrar.gif

But clearly I'm an idiot. I run Windows XP 64-bit on a quad-core CPU, and I really do get 4x the WinRar compression speed. I've timed it, because I use it to compress my backups, so it matters. It's 4x faster. Am I an idiot? Do I have difficulty telling time? You tell me.

HP announced a blade server with this capability last year and is shipping them now.

Options: Low-power Solid State Drives (SSD) that use less than 2 watts of power