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How about a good old HP Ipaq with Wi-Fi to connect to your own network? Check them out here http://www.shopping.hp.com/webapp/shopping/can.do;HHOJSID=JbhsJ0gRVTyJS4M8kthGtn9GVVQ2dVLy2dnJjVMGN1t30Pmmpzmw!2025033603?landing=handheld&category=HP&catLevel=1&storeName=storefronts&lanAttr=Type

It was designed to let modules written in many languages all link together in one application, so each piece can be written in the language that most suits the problem. To facilitate that goal, all language compilers create a common .OBJ format.

http://h30266.www3.hp.com/odl/vax/opsys/vmsos73/vmsos73/5973/5973pro.html

Postscript printers usually do. The cheaper ones aren't worth the trouble sometimes.

HP has a Windows-only universal driver that might interest you.
http://h20338.www2.hp.com/Hpsub/cache/342988-0-0-225-121.html

We have a cheap HP color laserjet, I think 6100n, in the office. The Windows driver and the Mac driver disagree on the printable area of the page. The colors don't match either but I guess it'd be strange if they did. It's aggravating when designing a brochure or something because it means I have to make PDFs and move everything to another machine if I want it to print a certain way. I have a strong feeling that, were it a postscript printer, I would not have these issues.

With PCL sometimes you run up against the fact that some printers speak PCL5 (or one of its variants) and others PCL6. PCL in general lacks many of the features of PS and is not as precise. So I guess you can thank HP for the state of the modern printer driver.

The HP "Mobile Internet Experience" Distro, designed to be only used on their netbooks, but _excellent_ on others, including my Lenovo S10 is my recommendation. You install it by using HP's "recovery usb key" tool :) Get it at http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/softwareList?os=2020&lc=en&dlc=en&cc=us&product=3860346# It's very usuable, and fits right into the idea of a personal device as a resource to you. Plus, it's Ubuntu underneath, so you can add whatever you want :)

and it's already happened with the HP 1000 which has a very nice GUI on top of Ubuntu.

> Most people don't "buy" Windows. They buy a PC and it just happens to be installed.

True enough. But OEMs buy Windows. It is the most expensive part in low end units.

> Until they're aware that they're paying for it then it makes no difference whether or not it's free.

Which finally is happening. HP broke the unwritten rule and have multiple operating systems in a dropdown box with prices beside each one.

HP Mini 2140

> If things get rough Microsoft can drop the price to $20 and nobody will care either way.

That works up to a point. But $0.01 is a world apart from $0.00 and once you are doing free the arguments against Free become few and the advantages are many.

atleast here in india. every computer that has not been bought from dell, hp or some other international company has pirate windows and office on it. recently microsoft complained to a big company here and guess what they switched completely to ubuntu.

Even many computers bought from HP do...

Look at the laptop models HP sells in India

Most of them don't have Windows pre-installed, they have FreeDOS. I doubt there are that many people actually using FreeDOS.

Uh, yeah they do. The HP Mininote 2133 is one example. I run my MythTV box on a Mini ITX EPIA MII motherboard. The video chipsets do MPEG2 and H.264 offloading, so they handle the job quite nicely with a dedicated tuner card, just don't expect to be doing any transcoding on the lowly C3's and C7's. The Via Nano supposedly can compete very well against the Atom, since Intel saddled all their designs with a massive northbridge.

but you can't get it so that is off the table

Who told you that? Sure you can. You can't "not get a Vista license" but you can sure get XP preinstalled now and probably for a long time into the future. A lot of the new platforms released in the last six months still don't support Vista at all. So you get the "professionally installed pre-downgrade" with the theoretical permission to run Vista, if you can get it to go.

You can't exactly go out a buy an XP machine anymore; well, not without a price.

You can't? Try hp workstations. They've got what you crave.

Genuine Windows Vista® 32 downgrade to Genuine Microsoft® Windows® XP Professional 32

That means it comes with a Vista license, but XP Pro installed. There is finally one "Vista installed" option, at $2199. XP Pro installed options start at $699. The "price" is decidedly not in Vista's favor here. I seriously doubt the major vendors are going to let go of XP before W7 is fully in the market, and maybe not even then for a year or more. They're not in the business of telling people they can't have what they want.

OpenVMS had both "impersonation" and "capabilities" (or "privileges") (See here). Where from they have actually came to WinNT.

Capabilities might be hard to spot, because in *nix universe (of which VMS is distant relative) they are bound to access to special files (normally under /dev in *nix and magic file names in VMS). By defining who has access to the special files, you define their capabilities.

I'm not a VMS historian so I cannot tell when the features went into the OS, yet AFAIK most of VMS development and core feature were stabilized by mid 80s. E.g. ACLs in VMS apparently appeared in 1984. Probably googling for "vms history" would bring more info. (Name change to "OpenVMS" happened in 1991.)

The NES, Sega Genesis, Neo Geo, N64, and probably other consoles I can't remember have required memory upgrades to play certain games. The Dreamcast, PS2, Original XBOX, XBOX 360, and PS3 have OS updates and game patches. I can't think of any console that offered a processor upgrade off the top of my head (the Jaguar maybe?).

Sega Genesis had the Sega CD, which contained a processor faster than the one in the Genesis. It also had the 32X, which was about half as powerful as the Saturn. But all "memory upgrades" for the North American and European NES (that is, everything but the Japan-only Famicom Disk System) have been limited to memory chips inside the Game Pak, the same sorts of memory chips used for saved games in Sega Genesis and Super NES carts. And what kinds of user-installable OS updates are you talking about for Dreamcast or PlayStation 2?

PC gaming used to be dominated by point and click adventure games and flight sims. These genres didn't transition to the consoles, they faded in popularity.

As far as I know, point-and-click adventures did transition to the DS and Wii. See Hotel Dusk, the Ace Attorney series and Zack and Wiki . Even Myst got ported to DS.

It's not going to happen unless people stop using PCs or manufacturers refuse to make gaming hardware for PCs.

Both Microsoft and Logitech make game controllers, but it's hard to buy one with a PC. I just went to HP.com's gaming accessories page and saw only keyboards, mouse, and speakers, not the gamepads that would be useful for two or three people sitting in front of a TV playing an arcade-style game on an HTPC. Dell has them though.

Yup, works great too. My work configuration is an Intel 17" iMac with a 20" LCD attached.

Mine is a MacBook Pro and I'm looking for another monitor, at least 24". I'd get Apple's new 24" LED backlit monitor but it costs a bit more than I'd like to pay. I've been looking lately at Doublesight's 26" DS-265 W or HP's 24" LP2475w. I want it for photography and they both had some good reviews, along with bad ones but mostly good, on photography websites like photo.net.

I was hoping for an updated Mini, I'm in the market as soon as it's out.

What I'd really like is a bigger MBP, about 2 years ago I saw a 21" laptop at BestBuy but it ran Windows, with higher resolution graphics and a bigger and faster hdd. My MBP has a 160 GB drive but I only have 25 GB free space on it.

Falcon

Firefox manages to run on Mac, Linux, Windows, and BSD.

...and (from a quick google search) AIX, OS/2, Solaris, HP-UX, BeOS, and something called RISCOS that I haven't even heard of before now... and probably more!

This entire thread has been about the effectiveness of the current U.S. policy regarding export restrictions. snowgirl argued, in part, that the restrictions are socially ineffective, I've argued that they are logistically ineffective. I've even argued for new or different policies and laws: "Resources applied to enforcing policies which have been demonstrated to be incompletely effective (or, ineffective), can instead be applied to try newer, more effective policies."

No, Snow girl argues that she didn't see the need for the restrictions. I set her strait on that. You came in saying something about Iran's neighbors getting access to the stuff with E-waste as if that mattered. I pointed out that it didn't matter then you picked up on the effectiveness of embargoes. Either way, you don't give people who claim to want to hurt you or your friends the raw materials to make that easy. I don't know how much simpler that statement can be made.

Your position here is unclear, but the underlined sentence highlights where we differ fundamentally. It is my contention that the citizens of an effective democratic government should be able to cause laws to be changed, and that the application and enforcement of laws should not be completely uniform and without judgment. Contemporary practice indicates that the U.S. export control regime agrees with at least the second part of my contention, insofar as they inspect only one percent of eligible goods entering and exiting the U.S., they do next to nothing to practically restrict the export of digital munitions (encryption products) via software, and they do not prevent restricted military surplus from being auctioned and exported abroad from on-line stores legally incorporated in the U.S.

My point is pretty clear, I'm not sure how your missing it. If you want the law changed, then work to change it. If no one agrees with you, then don't violate the law or don't expect sympathy when you get busted. And your wrong, they do quite a bit to track and control exports. Of course they rely a lot on self reporting and people following the laws but they also track imports into restricted companies. Not catching one actor for a period of time isn't proof that they don't do enough, it it proof that one actor violated the law and needs to be held accountable for it. In this case, it appears to be a flagrant violation of the law which will probably involve jail time for someone at HP as well as massive fines.

Unless someone specifically complains that some U.S.-based legal entity at HP or any other company is exporting to Iran, I would expect the enforcement agencies to focus on more effective sections of the existing legislation. It is much more useful to prevent new engineering designs and components which would enhance the range and lethality of weapons from reaching Iran, than to stop the flow of consumer electronics which provide next to no enhancement to their existing weapons and capabilities, WHETHER OR NOT such devices are easily obtainable.

So you don't think the 500mhz mips processor in most HP office machines or even the smaller 200 MHZ processors in the P1006 or the 4200N laser desktop printers wouldn't do that with the munitions capabilities? It is more powerful then most Stratix based missile guidance systems in early ICBM systems. Chain a series of these together with just half the memory that comes stock in a a 9500hdn, ad a GPS and outside of hardening, you have the effective equivalent of 1990's era cruise missile and smart bomb guidance systems. This is without even considering the EIO device specs like the 620n jet direct cars that come with them. Of course it would require the disassembl

You can also buy a Model M "clone" for a lot less money. Mine cost $15 from Keytronic a few years ago.

http://www.keytronicems.com/home/keyboards/keyboards/keyboards.html

You do not have to spend $100-$150 to get a good keyboard. One modern keyboard that is worthy of mention is the HP keyboard that comes standard on their workstations:

http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF06c/A10-51210-69998-329254-69998-3311101-3311102-3311104.html

The keypress has a nice feel to it, more so than any $100+ logitech I've tried.

Bruce Perens was well-known in the open source community as the project leader of Debian and for founding the Open Source Initiative (and creating the Open Source Definition) long before his 2-year stint at HP.

and i don't recall Perens or any other open source leader ever claiming that Linux was a 'sure thing.' though pretty much every major system vendor (HP, Lenovo, IBM, Dell, Apple, etc.) today has a Linux division or is involved with FOSS in some way--a situation which Perens has played no small part in creating.

We are local government and we have migrated to EDMS for just such a thing. We are using TechnologyOne's Dataworks http://www.technologyone.com.au/index.php?id=270 But HP's Trim is worth a look as well http://h18006.www1.hp.com/products/software/im/governance_ediscovery/trim/index.html Depending on the size of your company. I would be *tin foil hat* about using Google analytics for such a thing...

My grandma has had amazing success with SoftShell. Basic email, photos, games and very simple web browsing (e.g. no scroll bars, pop-ups, etc). It is for Windows and can be configured to run when the computer starts, so she never has to see any of the Windows interface like auto-updates, etc... We combined it with an HP Touchsmart ($1100) touch screen computer and it's so friggin' simple with the touchscreen (i.e. touch the 'mail' button to read new email, done) that she learned it in 5 minutes. You can also add people to her address book and add bookmarks remotely, which is nice...

Has he looked at what the company he works for has been selling for well over a year now?

Using the page: http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/execteam/email/hurd/index.html I am making a short suggestion to pre-install Ubuntu. Maybe you should also.

This page is kind of fun, showing HP's technology where they light the mechanism from lots of angles and photograph them. (Needs Java).

just get one of these things and stick it next to the fridge in the kitchen.

http://h18006.www1.hp.com/products/storageworks/xp24000/index.html

I remember using the HP 150 touch screen monitor in the 1980's. It seemed kind of cool at the time, but since it could be used in that mode only with DOS programs specifically written for it, it remained a non-solution for a non-problem. Also, Zarkonnen's comment about "gorilla arm" is absolutely correct; I found myself using my left hand to hold up my right arm while poking at the stupid screen. It seemed cool for a little while, but it got harder rather than easier to use over time. Even the Word Perfect shortcut keys didn't have that disadvantage.

The only user input device worse than that is that little blue clit between the letters G, H, and B on my laptop. I have, of course, disabled the touchpad that used to send the cursor skittering in every direction.

This is the laptop in question. Under the Special offers and deals section.

Well.. probably on a lot of their pages. But that happened to be the one I looked at.

HP might call it an opportunity.

Not only does HP not charge extra to pre-upgrade you to XP, on HP workstations Vista installed is not even an option. This is not a new development - it's always been this way.

Did I get it wrong? It looks like the base model only has 512 meg RAM. Read more here: http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF06a/12454-12454-64287-321860-3328896-3658106.html

Who says you can't merge them, my console is on a desk like this:

http://www.walmart.com/catalog/product.do?product_id=9854979

With this TV:

http://www.walmart.com/catalog/product.do?product_id=9204671

With this printer down below:

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?docname=bpd02982&lc=en&dlc=en&cc=us&product=58749#

and this external hard drive that works in both Linux and GameOS:

http://www.amazon.com/Maxtor-Basics-Personal-Storage-External/dp/B000HKKNH8

And there's people with HTPC's in their living rooms attached to their big screen HDTV.

• Linux free
• IBM Linux
• Sun Linux
• HP Linux

HP came out with a new LCD display and (also in notebook form) that displays billions of colors.

This beats even apples cinelerra displays:
http://www.macobserver.com/review/2008/06/17.1.shtml

HP press release (on the notebook):
http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2008/080811xa.html?jumpid=reg_R1002_USEN

Many people don't know about it yet but it appears to be making waves..

Possibly apple is getting to comfortable with it's new marketshare.

Personally I will be looking at the displays as an alternative, when I buy yet a bigger monitor...

(disclosure: I work for EDS an HP company, as a consultant)

...probably the worlds best filesystems (Digitals AdvFS) has been released to OS and it seems that nobody cares...
I've used it a lot on Tru64 and I am quite sure that it would be a real hit for Linux.
We are trying to reinvent something we just can take for free...

I don't know how much penetration Debian has in the enterprise, but if someone stepped up to provide paid Debian support, I think they could make a lot of money

HP provides support for Debian and has for quite some time now.

I think this is the data set. I could be wrong though. The article (yeah yeah) says that

In our sorting experiments we have followed the rules of a standard terabyte (TB) sort benchmark.

Which lead me to this page that describes the data (and it's available for download).

Wait a minute...Dell (and HP, and Lenovo, and Toshiba, ad infinitum) already tell me what software I can run on my new computer. And that's always Windows.

• Dell - Ubuntu and FreeDOS (they also offer Solaris, Red Hat and SUSE on their servers)
• HP - various Linux distributions
• Lenovo said they would offer SUSE preloaded on their Thinkpads, though I can't find one now.
• Toshiba provides support for Linux on their systems.

That's just with ten minutes of googling. I'm sure you could do better with more time.

If you read my comment again, I asked for reference...
So here is a 17-inch CRT monitor and it is rated 64 watts average power consumption.
And here is a 20-inch LCD monitor and it is rated 50 watts.

So can you please elaborate on your point?

Perhaps garbage collection is better when someone doesn't get memory management... But it is not possible for garbage collection to perform better than a competent engineer.

You'd think so, wouldn't you? But it's not always true.

There are other ways as well -- every malloc and free that you write inline with your code is, well, more code. Which means more cache misses. A garbage collector should fit into cache for the duration of its run, and then be swapped out.

Certainly, it won't always win. And by definition, a human can always do at least as well because a human can at the very least write that garbage collector, and possibly other things on top of it. But if you care about performance, it is something to consider.

Four easy steps to dead-cheap SAN/NAS storage:

1. Buy HP DL180 or DL185 servers, with a Smart Array P800 RAID card
2. Buy 12 to 14 1TB or even 1.5TB hard disks from Seagate and trays in eBay (I've bought in the past from SCSITray and there are other sellers)
3. Install Solaris 10 or Nexenta OS, set up ZFS
4. Sun goes bankrupt

Four easy steps to dead-cheap SAN/NAS storage:

1. Buy HP DL180 or DL185 servers, with a Smart Array P800 RAID card
2. Buy 12 to 14 1TB or even 1.5TB hard disks from Seagate and trays in eBay (I've bought in the past from SCSITray and there are other sellers)
3. Install Solaris 10 or Nexenta OS, set up ZFS
4. Sun goes bankrupt

Four easy steps to dead-cheap SAN/NAS storage:

1. Buy HP DL180 or DL185 servers, with a Smart Array P800 RAID card
2. Buy 12 to 14 1TB or even 1.5TB hard disks from Seagate and trays in eBay (I've bought in the past from SCSITray and there are other sellers)
3. Install Solaris 10 or Nexenta OS, set up ZFS
4. Sun goes bankrupt

C is likely to remain strong until we just have more CPU power than [...]

We already do (have more than C can handle[1]): dual and quad core processors.

There is as of now no really good parallel (or multi-threaded) language. Java and Erlang are perhaps the best, which essentially says where we stand right now.

Please do not talk about Posix thread libraries, they do tell enough about the memory model. Java was the first language to define one, but it is not 100% clear. C++ is just about to define one for itself[2].

Therefore for example D is not the next language.

[1] Not that you said or even implied that.

[2] http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Hans_Boehm/c++mm/

Maybe they think they can clone a VMS Galaxy.

You want gear with integrated lights-out-management. Any gear that supports SSH and SNMP should be perfectly usable over a shitty connection.

Most (all?) of the Sun servers come with an embedded ILOM that supports remote KVM through a web browser with Java as well as SSH. The SSH access gives you full out-of-band power control over the server, and can be used to look at system part numbers, power supply voltages, fan speeds, etc. Additionally you can configure SNMP monitoring/traps through the ILOM no matter what OS is running on the box.

We've used the x2200 M2, x4200 M2, and x4540 servers and the ILOM in each of them means I never have to go down to our data center to physically touch a box.

Ironically, some of the HP DL series have integrated out-of-band management called iLO, but they charge an additional few hundred dollars to gain features such as KVM or authentication. I don't like paying extra for features that should just be available out of the box.

The other thing you want is remotely managed online battery power. You want your power to be clean, going through a dual transformer conversion so no matter what kind of crappy power you have at the site, your gear is getting a nice clean voltage. Get something that has a good network-management interface on it. I've used MinuteMan Endeavor, Liebert GXT2, and one from APC that was online, but I can't seem to find it now. Each of these supports SNMP and web-based management.

You want gear with integrated lights-out-management. Any gear that supports SSH and SNMP should be perfectly usable over a shitty connection.

Most (all?) of the Sun servers come with an embedded ILOM that supports remote KVM through a web browser with Java as well as SSH. The SSH access gives you full out-of-band power control over the server, and can be used to look at system part numbers, power supply voltages, fan speeds, etc. Additionally you can configure SNMP monitoring/traps through the ILOM no matter what OS is running on the box.

We've used the x2200 M2, x4200 M2, and x4540 servers and the ILOM in each of them means I never have to go down to our data center to physically touch a box.

Ironically, some of the HP DL series have integrated out-of-band management called iLO, but they charge an additional few hundred dollars to gain features such as KVM or authentication. I don't like paying extra for features that should just be available out of the box.

The other thing you want is remotely managed online battery power. You want your power to be clean, going through a dual transformer conversion so no matter what kind of crappy power you have at the site, your gear is getting a nice clean voltage. Get something that has a good network-management interface on it. I've used MinuteMan Endeavor, Liebert GXT2, and one from APC that was online, but I can't seem to find it now. Each of these supports SNMP and web-based management.

This is just an example for the scanner/printer I have, but are you aware that HP does come with bare-bones driver-only packages?
Like this?

I absolutely hated the scanning interface, but then I installed this and use Irfanview to invoke the other non-twain interface which is quite decent compared to the other one.

you should see the UI on their high end equipment. When you're using it every day, you get used to it, but it's definitely not like any other program i've used before.

Powering down your servers tends to introduce response issues. :-)
Some servers, like the HP ProLiant line, has power management features. Try experimenting with features like these first.

All your software is managed an upgraded using a single GUI interface, some distros can even do major version upgrade with a few mouse clicks - try upgrading from XP to Vista that way!

Ehm.. FYI: to do a mayor OS upgrade with just a few mouse clicks, works just fine, even in Windows. The only difference is with Windows, those few mouse clicks are a hell-uv-a-lot more expensive.

posting an anon follow-up - here's the info on the "you can buy a third party SCSI card!" from hp;
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?lang=en&cc=uk&taskId=125&prodSeriesId=25307&prodTypeId=15179&objectID=bps05132
- "HP Scanjet - HP Scanjet Scanners and Symbios Logic SCSI Interface Cards"

So I said no thanks, and when I eventually got XP (After 98SE), I simply moved on to the new scanner that fit my needs anyway.

These myths about Ethernet just refuse to die. Please do not propagate them.

http://hpl.hp.com/techreports/Compaq-DEC/WRL-88-4.pdf

D. R. Boggs , J. C. Mogul , C. A. Kent, Measured capacity of an Ethernet: myths and reality, ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, v.25 n.1, p.123-136, Jan. 1995

I agree video adaptors are annoying, but DisplayPort is a step in the right direction -- it's not something that Apple invented, and it's becoming available on Dell, HP, Lenovo, Samsung, etc. systems and displays as well.

So at the very least you won't be stuck buying Apple-produced adaptors or having the adaptor only work with one model of laptop.

http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/en/WF06c/A10-51210-64268-348724-64268-3769762-3769763-3769765.html