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Who doesn't use bash?

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/genericDocument ?cc=us&docname=c00517832&lc=en&jumpid=reg_R1002_US EN

Also, the manufacturer's name is at the far right of the printed side of the battery (mine seems to be LG).

http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/globalcitizenship/csr/sbc brochure.pdf This is a link to the SBC or the standards of business conduct. This was the bible of HP for many many years and it appears that although some question whether these rules are practiced at the lower levels, it appears that they are not at the higher levels either. If this was actions of any HP employee, they would be TERMINATED. This is several magnitudes more extreme of a situation. The idea is not to operate within just the language and the loopholes, but to abide by the intent of the document which is to set the stage for proper conduct with a low threshold in cases where there is any question of being appropriate. This saddens many HP employees who have worked hard to reinforce a positive image of the company which did operate on a much more noble level in the past.

HP 50g with built-in SD card slot.

http://www.hp.com/ hpinfo/execteam/email/bod/index.html

Her "I-came-up-from-the-mailroom" speech

Is that speech listed on this page? I'd be interested in knowing which one it was.

I wonder if Jason works for the board of directors of this company.

HP invented the ink jet. That was back in the early 1980's when HP still was an innovative engineering company. However, all the early Laser Jets were based on a Canon print engine. Check out wikipedia, and if you don't believe that, here's an article on the HP site..

Yes, it's in place...
and it's bulletproof, too! http://h71028.www7.hp.com/ERC/cache/49205-0-0-225- 121.aspx?bodycontentparams=320065-0-0-0-121&ERL=tr ue

If you have HP products and are on an automatic driver update list you can hit the "unsubscribe" in the last update email - and that will log you on associated with your product or products (making you a high-value feedback / validated customer) and then you can send "real" feedback through the Contact link. Select the CEO and select business suggestions from the pulldown menu (no - you can't give your own subject). If you don't have HP products you can send low-value feedback here http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/execteam/email/hurd/index .html/

I cancelled all of my subscriptions and in feedback said that the actions of the Chairwoman Patricia Dunn were inconsistent with the law and good business practice and that I was not going to purchase another HP product until there were significant changes in the board and HP's business practices. I also gave them my name, address, phone and fax of my law firm. I can be validated and want to be counted as one very outraged customer / shareholder.

I have divested myself of all HP stock (200 shares were given to me when I entered college 33 years ago) - but I also hold TIAA-CREF and other funds that do not allow me to elect the stock purchases / holdings. I have sent them letters asking that they express grave concern about HP's management.

Frankly, since the takeover I have been unhappy with the quality of the products and I have Laserjet 500s still doing solid work after nearly 20 years. The last HP printers I bought for the firm were 4100N's with the postscript option and three tray feeds. Nothing has been as solid as the older printers.

Send the company a major message that this kind of management stupidity will result in massive loss of business.

This is the time for the "Slashdot effect" to make a difference.

If you're a disgruntled HP shareholder who's concerned about the bad publicity this whole this is creating, you can contact HP's Board of Directors through their website and share you're concerns.

http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/execteam/email/bod/index. html

Patricia Dunn is the Chairman of the Board (the person who runs the meetings of the Board of Directors), not the CEO. The CEO is the person who has reponsiblity for the operation of the company.

http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/investor/structure.html

You'll noticed it specifically says "Non Employee Directors" - for those who thought the notion that HP is entitled to know information because "they are employees".

The Board of Directors are the representatives of the owners to make sure the company's managment is not defrauding the investors (See: Audit Committee), setting the compenstation for its managers and generally working to maximize the value of the stockholder's investment. The job of the Board of Directors is oversight of the managers.

Mark Hurd is the CEO and President of HP:

http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/execteam/

Guess some folks should not have skipped those business classes in college... (assuming they are not still in High School)

Patricia Dunn is the Chairman of the Board (the person who runs the meetings of the Board of Directors), not the CEO. The CEO is the person who has reponsiblity for the operation of the company.

http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/investor/structure.html

You'll noticed it specifically says "Non Employee Directors" - for those who thought the notion that HP is entitled to know information because "they are employees".

The Board of Directors are the representatives of the owners to make sure the company's managment is not defrauding the investors (See: Audit Committee), setting the compenstation for its managers and generally working to maximize the value of the stockholder's investment. The job of the Board of Directors is oversight of the managers.

Mark Hurd is the CEO and President of HP:

http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/execteam/

Guess some folks should not have skipped those business classes in college... (assuming they are not still in High School)

>I personally don't understand exactly how this browsershield works

Quite simple, really. You can tell a lot just from the description.

As a first step, before testing whether the downloaded code is malicious, they'll have to do the much simpler test of whether the code goes into an infinite loop that ties up machine resources. We've all seen browsers suddenly peg the CPU at 100% and become non-responsive. This isn't innovative, though, because infinite loop detection was researched thoroughly a lifetime ago.

This is advertised as a solution to problems such as the WMF 0-day exploit. You could simply ship it blocking WMFs, but that wouldn't help with the occasional JPEG renderer exploit. Therefore it must also analyze the code in the browser to check whether the incoming content will trigger a security vulnerability.

Quite impressive as advertised, a big step in the state of the art. Using existing technology under existing theory it couldn't possibly have the claimed abilities.

A less innovative company would develop an auto-updating signature-based product. For example, such a product could get an emergency update to block WMFs while a permanent fix got developed and tested. Unfortunately such a product would be obviously futile since every exploit writer who had IE would have a copy and would simply make testing against BrowserShield part of their release cycle.

A more innovative company would limit the privileges of the browser so as to contain any security breach. HP Labs did interesting work on sandboxing Windows apps without even needing the source code. See the HP Labs Polaris and Capdesk resesarch.

It might just run linux. If not I'm sure Firefox or a good live CD can fix things for you.

For every joke there's some nut to make it happen.

...here.

I met a traveller from a silicon land
Who said: Two life-sized cutouts of cardboard
Stand near Palo Alto. Near it, at 367 Addison Avenue,
Half sunk, a shatter'd garage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on a pedestal in Cupertino these words appear:
"My name is Carly Fiorina, queen of queens:
Look on my works, Bill and David, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, outsourced and bare,
The stock options stretch far out of the money.

The Turion 64 X2 was only released very recently, and to this day, good systems (read, NOT from HP or Compaq) with Turion 64s (let alone X2 variants) are hard to find.

The Turion 64 X2 was only released very recently, and to this day, good systems (read, NOT from HP or Compaq) with Turion 64s (let alone X2 variants) are hard to find.

I'm not sure if this will help you out, but this utility plus any old bootdisk made mine bootable for running things like BIOS updates and diagnostics. If only all systems could boot to USB drives, my life would be so much easier...

HP can barely handle the point and click associated with RHEL and Windows. I'm at a loss as to who in that company is going to support Debian. I know it's surely not their L1 or L2 phone techs.

Let me know where I can get a dual core small form factor PC for significantly less than $800. Not from Dell, not from HP. HPs offering comes in at $650 after the rebate, but doesn't include things like wireless or even a dvd burner, it eats more power, and is huge. Dell rings in at 1200 but does come with a 20" monitor that you can buy for $400, so total cost is about $800, same as a mac mini. Both have shared mem video cards, again the Dell lacks a dvd writer(but it makes up for that by coming with a gig of ram standard) but it is a bigger case and uses the Pentium D chip. You would be hard pressed to even build one from newegg for that amount(you can if you don't mind the behemoth case, but I do). So yeah, you are right, Apple doesn't even come close on price :P

Yeah, but can it run Linux?

>It's also very fast

-sarcasm on-
Excuse me? A reference counting implementation that is fast. Could you please post some links to articles describing this magical algorithm?
-sarcasm off-

Mark-and-sweep GC or copying GC is _always_ faster than doing reference counting.

references:
http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Hans_Boehm/gc/issue s.html
http://www.cs.umass.edu/~emery/pubs/gcvsmalloc.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reference_counting

--Blerik

FWIW, HP will still sell you an AlphaStation that runs OpenVMS:

http://h18002.www1.hp.com/alphaserver/workstations /ds15/

It looks like it will fit under or on top of your desk just fine. They might not come in under US$3000, but I didn't ask for a quote, either.

Nothing "was" about it. VMS is still under active development. Version 8.3 has just finished wide beta. http://www.hp.com/go/vms has all the details. VMS -- 29 years and still counting.

I also have a 2600N and on quality paper it makes great color prints and is pretty fast at it too. Further I used the HP Trade in program (http://www.hp.com/united-states/tradein/home_alt. html)
  when I purchased my printer. I had an old HP Laserjet 4 (man those things are work horses) that they gave me an $80 credit on plus paid for shipping back to HP. All in all I spent about 200 - 220 on a color laser printer with networking, I'm very happy with the results.

HP LaserJet 2600n It is color, but once you go color laser, you have very little use for Color Inkjet (other than occassional photo paper printing). It has network ability. The included toner does last for about 1000-1500 pages, and for the most part, I'm satisfied with the print quality. However, I'm very suspect of its color matching abilities, but then again, this printer I don't think is certifed for such... Fairly fast to boot to (about 5-6 seconds for first page). Despite its MSRP of $399, it can be occassionally had for $350-$299 if you look hard enough. OfficeDepot do have these guys on sale occassionally.

You are looking at a VERY specific small product line. Look at the Proliant Linux support matrix and Debian is nowhere to be seen. You CAN NOT download HP drivers and support software for Debian on the number one HP server platform.

Don't get me wrong, I run Debian at home for my desktop and home server and prefer it personally, but my home use and the realities of the enterprise are two VERY VERY different things.

Being able to get support (from an end user perspective) is NOT the issue. A company like HP wants to deal with another COMPANY that has TOTAL control over the distribution, and has a large enough support / engineering staff to work with effectivly. The only two Linux distribution companies that fit that bill at this point are Novell and Red Hat. Red Hat (being a large company with hundreds of employees) has the resources to support MANY ISV's and hardware companies at a very high level at the same time. Debian and Ubuntu, while being awesome distributions, simply do not have these resources.

You need to start looking at this issue from an enterprise point of view and not a small-business / personal point of view in order to understand it.

Um, Debian is HP's linux distribution of choice. HP maintains the Carrier Grade version of Sarge. which they supply to Motorola and others.

I just don't understand where this myth that you cannot get support for debian comes from. With 658 Debian consultants in 59 countries Debian seems to have more support options than most other distributions. I will admit that some of those consultants are single person outfits. But HP is also on the list.

You might want to reexamine your assumptions.

I don't know if HP has sold a million+ PCs in one sale, but they do a lot of similar charitable work like this. They are pretty giving in comparison to many other corporate giants.

http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/globalcitizenship/gcrepor t/socialinvest.html

"Some users will find the feature objectionable because it could give the bossman a new way to check up on employees"

What's stoping the bossman from going back through the tape archive and doing the same thing?

"or perhaps it could be exploited in some nefarious way by some nefarious person"

That shouldn't present a problem assuming that file system security can't be bypassed.

"When you access a Shadow Copy, the file and folder ACLs still apply "

"VSS takes a snapshot (aka Shadow Copy) of the state of content stored on selected volume shares"

Could get the same functionality using rsync and using symlinks for files that haven't changed. Building up a number of virtual directories.

"the user can simply view .. and recover the file without troubling the administrator"

I recall Vax/VMS saved a different version each time the file was saved. Such functionality built directly into the file system. I read here that Xerox PARC got their first with something called Cedar.

"In Cedar, files were immutable; writing to a file produced a new version of the file and file names included a version number (e.g., filename! 10). A similar idea was found in the RSX, VMS [2], and TOPS-10/-20 [6] operating systems from Digital."

1. 1GB ram
2. 1.8GHZ single core.
3. 6+ hours battery life when I pull out the DVD drive and stick in the extension pack. Three hours otherwise.

4. The more ram you have, the worse the resume from hibernate, and there is too much corporate security junk (firewall, VPN, Symantec) to take up memory and battery life. The extra battery pack is very good for conferences, as I dont need to sit glued to power cords all day long.

   The problem with long-life laptops is most people prefer performance over battery life. And with reason -most people don't go that far without a recharge. The most definitive data gathering on this topic was actually an experiment I did in 1999, logging how different people used a laptop for six months, in a paper called "the secret life of laptops"

   The conclusion we came to then was that power at home and work was unimportant, compared to the wide variation in network state. Getting consistent networking mattered much more to people.

   Now that we have near-universal, WLAN, maybe being unwired matters more. I should rerun the experiment, but first I need to finish the analysis of my ongoing experiment, that of capturing the bluetooth ID of every discoverable mobile phone that goes past my house. Embrace experimental computer science!

money for all the productivity software, anti-virus software and utilities you need

Somewhat amusingly, you mention this as a downside to "HP/Dell", as compared to Mac. Amusingly because you go to http://www.hp.com/ or http://www.dell.com/ and you see their offerings bundled with things like Paint Shop Pro, DVD burning software, office suites, home finance packages.

Last time I checked, you couldn't even unpack a ZIP file out-of-the box on Windows.

2001 called, it wants your out of date FUD back. Integrated ZIP support has been in Windows XP since release.

Real servers are rackable, in 19 inch wide, 42U (~72 inches I think ) high racks.

One UPS, hot swapable batteries are nice, but we fry as many APC brand controllers as we kill batteries. I like to have an independent AC line conditioner, on a serperate AC mains circuit (i.e. different 15A circuit breaker) so that those real servers with dual power supplies (hot swappable of course) go one to UPS, one to the line conditioner (for UPS failures). Have enough circuits (not just more plugs) to accomidate future growth. A Watts Up? or Kill-A-Watt meter are nice to measuring your electrical consumption.

Honestly with how swappable hardware RAID-5 disks, hot swappable power supplies, sensible power distribution, and practicing regular backup hygenie, downtime can be minimized to mere hours per year range or less with care and planning of the administrator(s).

I also love KVM over IP (I use an ) or ILO (Intergrated Lights Out management) for headless servers, and have a backup AC available for server rooms/closets.

For servers ideas look at HP Proliant DL380 or Dell PowerEdge 2850 series.

BASF Research
Batelle
BBC Research & Development
General Electric Global Research

Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft
Motorola Labs
Microsoft Research
HP Labs
IBM Research
Intel Research
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Philips Research
Corporate Research
The Tata Institute of Fundamental Research
Toshiba Research Europa
Toyota Central R&D Labs
Viewpoints Research Institute

This already occurs in the server space - the Hewlett-Packard DL-585 has their (AMD Opteron) CPUs and memory on grouped daughterboards.

Not a bad box in my experience, but my only gripe? Woe betide the fool who doesn't use HP-branded RAM on the bastich...

/P

HP's Service Center. While I hated using it, that was more the way it was implemented in the enterprise I was in at the time. Built from the ground up for ITIL compliance.

http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2004/HPL-2004-22 1.html

Application shortcuts were replaced by a script that copied configuration files into a jail (implemented as a restricted account), did a Run As to start the application under the restricted account, and hooked the standard file open dialogs to copy files that the user asked for into the jail. Far from complete, but it was fascinating how much they did with how little (no kernel changes, for example).

AMD, like Intel, could be convinced to open up the specifications to their graphics hardware in order to sell more of their complement product, processors. The difference is that ATI Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) don't suck like Intel GPUs. AMD could have almost 100% of the Linux notebook market within a year and my guess is HP would be the big winner because they already have a business line of AMD notebooks with ATI GPUs: HP Compaq nx6125 Notebook for Business (New Zealand link since this Anonymous Coward is from NZ)

This sort of thing [highly parallelizable, highly fault-tolerant computing] was done more than a decade ago, at Hewlett-Packard, in the old Teramac group.

Background here, here, here, etc.

HP says that the chip will "bridge the digital and physical worlds." Taub demonstrated picture albums with the nearly-invisible chip attached to the borders. When a reader touched the chip, audio from the picture was played. Taub next waved the reader over the chip on a medicine bottle and the attached computer received the dosage, direction, and all other pertinent information from the prescription.

Also, from the HP press release:

Information can be accessed by a read-write device that could be incorporated into a cell phone, PDA, camera, printer or other implement. To access information, the read-write device is positioned closely over the chip, which is then powered so that the stored data is transferred instantly to the display of the phone, camera or PDA or printed out by the printer. Users could also add information to the chip using the various devices.

It will be interesting to see when and how runtime code optimization affects the high vs. low-level language debate. Systems like HP's Dynamo http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/1999/HPL-1999-77 .html show there's gains to be had here, but afaik these techniques are not being used by major language runtimes.

20 years ago there was nothing strange about having an actual quicksort machine instruction (VAXen had it).

While the VAX had some complex instructions (such as double-linked queue handling), it did not have a quicksort instruction.

Here is the instruction set manual.

OT, but interesting is HP's interactive relighting of the Antikythera Mechanism.

I've heard about this research about a year ago or something, and I can still draw the same simple conclusion:

RFID is read-only, a read-only virus can't spread, so it isn't a virus!

Unless you write a really really bad RFID-chip reader which can buffer-overflow and write in memory a simple RFID chip can't do any harm. So its also pretty safe to use...

Don't go thinking about infecting your local supermarket with a new RFID-virus, it'll never happen.

But while we're on it, have you guys heard about HP's Memory Spots? Its a new kind of wireless chip. The connection is much faster then RFID and the memory size is bigger. The biggest gain is in the size, 2 mm to 4 mm square with a build in antenna!

I think the bigger news is the sun blade system. They were miising it for so long and now they have something to compete with IBM and HP blade servers. And although sun's low end servers are something similar to blades ($1300 per unit duh!) they're not quite the same.

> Please enlighten me as to how you can garbage collect an object when you can't tell if it's still in use?

Actually, you *can* to some extent. Check out the Boehm Garbage Collector:
http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Hans_Boehm/gc/gcdes cr.html

The basic idea is that it looks at the registers, the stack(s), and the static data region(s), and heap for any sequence of bytes that *looks* like a pointer and assumes that it is. Once it's done the memory scan, it reclaims all memory that hasn't been pointed to by these alleged pointers. I know it sounds crazy and it's easy to think of various scenarios that will cause memory to never be reclaimed, but it works surprisingly well and is extremely portable.

Tell that to HP. Their Project Dynamo showed that in many cases running PA-RISC instructions emulated on on PA-RISC machine improved the performance of the program without changing how it was compiled. The emulated version can start to re-order code, change branching behavoir, etc as needed based on how the program is actually running (things like a JIT does on Java or .NET). So there is a place for Native to Native emulation; even if it seems silly.

There's more information on Kolmogorov's scaling laws here, not that I understand most of it. As far as I can tell, in a turbulent system the difference between the values of a physical property at two points follows a power law with respect to the distance between the points; the power laws for different physical properties have different exponents, but they all seem to be multiples of a third (?).