Slashdot Mirror

Judging from the outside, HP's CEO before Carly, Lew Platt, was a terrible manager. But Carly was far worse.

While HP was under Carly, our company stopped buying HP products because we would discover large problems within the first few minutes of installation and use. If the disconnected-from-reality mood of HP's technical support was any guide, things were VERY weird at HP while Carly was there.

A lot of HP's ability to make a profit comes from selling inkjet ink for $8000 per gallon and from people who learned long ago that HP had the best products, but have not updated their understanding.

Carly's former job was at Lucent Technologies, another company on the way down. Lucent has gone from about 165,000 employees to 30,500 employees, and from $84 share price to $2.37.

Note that Lucent is another company with a female CEO, Patricia Russo.

Both Carly Fiorina and Patricia Russo are heavily involved with Bush league politics. They inhabit a parallel universe in which they are considered a success while their organizations are on the way down, just some have considered the the U.S. government a success as it has been on the way down since Bush was elected. Losers find each other.

Some people think that someone with no technical experience, and little respect for technical experience, can run a technical company. I think that belief is hogwash.

What you were told is still true. Do you think that a major bank, or an insurance company, runs its databases off of a Dell PC? Unlikely.

Not released?? http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/1251 8_div/12518_div.html and http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/H ome.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&prodTypeId=15351&prodSeriesI d=1842750 may disagree, taken from a few threads below.

Not released?? http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/1251 8_div/12518_div.html and http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/H ome.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&prodTypeId=15351&prodSeriesI d=1842750 may disagree, taken from a few threads below.

As usual, unreleased product from company A beats released product from company B.

Unreleased product?

As usual, unreleased product from company A beats released product from company B.

Unreleased product?

especially the Alpha (R.I.P.)

Alpha isn't dead, yet.
http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/servers/byos/op envmsservers.html

Now how about a proper 1080p TV then? There are HDTV's that have a 1080p display, but don't take 1080p inputs, and TVs that take 1080p but downscale it to 720p. Make up your mind!

It all depends on what you are trying to do

For some workloads, many servers with four drives each may work. This is the Petabox/Google model. This works if you have a parallelisable problem and can push most of your computation out to the storage servers.
Remember, you don't have a 300Tb drive, you have 300 servers, each with 1Tb of local storage.

For other workloads, you need a big disk aray and SAN, probably from Hitachi, Sun, or HP. This is the traditional model. Use this if you need a really big central storage pool or really high throughput.
Many SAN arrays can scale into the PB range without too much trouble.

Nowadays, a PB is enough to arch your eyebrows, but otherwise not that amazing. It seemes that commercial storage leads home storage by 1000. When home users had 1GB drives, 1TB was amazing. Now that some home users have 1TB, many companies have 1PB.

Hi,

sorry for writting you on this comment, my comment is completely offtopic but I found searching on google that you once managed to use a Notebook LCD screen with an overhead projector.

I am in the process of doing something similar although not using an overhead projector but building the projector from the ground up. I managed to get a 13 inches LCD laptop screen (from a broken vaio).

I have just started (just got the broken laptop), the first thing I searched for is the technical documentation of the laptop, unfortunately I have not found anything useful (unlike the great HP Maintenance and Service Guides , I have only been able to get the less than worthless Sony "user manual").

My specific question (now) is about the LCD to VGA (XGA?), connectors, how did you achieved that in your case?, how did you knew the way to connect the laptop LCD connectors to a VGA cable (or how did you did it)?

As you can see I am quite at the beginning of a daunting task, but I would love to do this project :)

Thanks for any help!

Cheers,

xtracto

Of the two, I'd go with Ubunutu. It's been better on desktops and laptops for me, especially with detecting hardware. I like SuSE (I use SLES9 on our servers) but I think Ubuntu is the better desktop. They'll both have Evolution available.

For multimedia, I use mplayer + mencoder. There are plugins for the Gnome desktop/totem/whatever for generating previews. Mplayer has a GUI front end as well as the command line one, and will play DVDs etc happily, and can use native Windows codecs.

K3B is probably the nicest Linux burner app, although I think Nero has a Linux version too now. Be worth checking that out (it's free for Windows licensed users).

The NIC issue is a tricky one... some are supported, some aren't. Google and the Ubuntu wiki are your friends here. Eg, a page from 6 months ago: http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Jean_Tourrilhes/Lin ux/Linux.Wireless.drivers.802.11ag.html

HP developed a clever if hackish way to restrict the rights of a Windows application. They wrap the application's shortcut with a RunAs to a restricted account, then they grant the application access to its temp files and they copy into the jail all files the user has implicitly granted access to by using one of the standard file dialogs.

I've got my doubts about how far you can go with that approach (for example, they admitted that network access control was a problem), but consider their approach along with the strange and wonderful things you can do with Windows ACLs.

• Sun Microsystems Solaris and Linux Training
• IBM AIX Training
• IBM Linux Training
• HP's HP-UX Certification Training
• HP's Tru64 UNIX® Training
• Red Hat Training
• Novell SUSE Linux Training
• HP's NonStop UX Training
• Apple's Mac OS X Server Training
• And, if you're really sick... SCO's SCO UNIX Training

• Sun Microsystems Solaris and Linux Training
• IBM AIX Training
• IBM Linux Training
• HP's HP-UX Certification Training
• HP's Tru64 UNIX® Training
• Red Hat Training
• Novell SUSE Linux Training
• HP's NonStop UX Training
• Apple's Mac OS X Server Training
• And, if you're really sick... SCO's SCO UNIX Training

• Sun Microsystems Solaris and Linux Training
• IBM AIX Training
• IBM Linux Training
• HP's HP-UX Certification Training
• HP's Tru64 UNIX® Training
• Red Hat Training
• Novell SUSE Linux Training
• HP's NonStop UX Training
• Apple's Mac OS X Server Training
• And, if you're really sick... SCO's SCO UNIX Training

really?

I guess you haven't seen the Integrity line then. Serious performance, blows away both the Sun and IBM UNIX systems. Superdomes rock. :)

How many printers do you know that ship today or will be out within a year allow you to send a raw PDF file to it and have it print as is without any kind of client spooling and image degradation? XPS lets you do that.

You're about 20 years too late on this one. An Apple LaserWriter from 1985 can print postscript files just by doing cat file.ps > /dev/lp0 in linux, or copy file.ps lpt1 in DOS, or whatever technique your operating system uses to send raw postscript to the printer port. The whole idea of a postscript printer is that it prints raw postscript on the wire.

If you absolutely insist on pdf files as opposed to postscript files, any postscript level 3 printer can handle raw pdf files on the wire with no host processing whatsoever. For example, the HP LaserJet 2420 ships today and allows printing of raw pdf files.

I wonder if anyone has run feasibility studies on building datacenters in abandoned underground facilities? They're naturally temperature-controlled: anything more than a few feet down is going to hover around 40-50F, really the only problem you'd have is the possible humidity. But last time I saw specs on servers, they're fine to about 80% RH. You'd obviously have to be very careful about possible flooding issues if it was in an area prone to that, but overall I think you could make use of a lot of old industrial space, reduce or eliminate most cooling costs, and rent out aboveground space to other uses to reduce overhead.

It doesn't even have to be deep, salt-mine type underground: any old building with a sub-basement, or built partially into a hill with a basement, would do fine. There are quite a few old buildings in cities that were built with storage tunnels and cellars that would be suitable, built before the 'truss-and-curtainwall on concrete slab' style of industrial building had become the norm.

Because there are no documentation problems. Do you find an OS with a more well documentet API than Linux? More documentation than Gentoo has? The problem is that they have not studied what I'd dare say is the serious users, they've studied those without in-house competence on Linux.

*NIX-admins are probably more expensive than windows-admins, since there is fewer of them. Those organizations running old UNIX's typically have quite competent admins in-house, and quite different hardware. Windows and linux often runs on off-the-shelf hardware, which I guess explains why UNIX beats both of them

With Linux, the effect is double. A lot of companies have windows admins with some level of degree, but those who know unix, works in the serious business with big unix-machines. Those who adopt Linux have typically not used Unix before I guestimate.

What would be interesting would be to see a study between HP's Windows and Linux servers, since they provide the hardware themself, and should have in-house competance on both OS's.

Compare real things, do not compare different things. Anyone remember Microsoft UK's ad? I think it was along the lines of a x86 off-the-shelf with mssql and win2k compared to a IBM POWER machine. Of course, the ad proved that Linux was more expensive.... This reminds me of that.

HP might be an interesting choice:
http://h20219.www2.hp.com/services/cache/76815-0-0 -225-121.html

Turion x2 based HP machines DV2000z. They will be out in 2 weeks or so. Killer design made by Nisha in Japan. Here is the Intel verison

think really hard about why you want to spend your talent managing memory instead of doing things that'll really make your application shine.

I've been doing a large project in garbage-collected C++ lately. It's an option that few people consider, because it isn't well supported by the available C++ class libraries, but a little work (stuff like garbage-collected smart pointers, and things like that) can make a really nice development environment that frees you from worrying about memory management, but allows you to get underneath it and specify memory management details explicitly when you really need to. I think it's the best of both worlds.

Boehm-Demers-Weiser GC - all you'll need to make C++ useful.

Give me a moment, and I'm sure I'll think of one.

That's because HP printers have Ozone Emissions. Thanks HP for saving the World.

In the end, the only part of this WORST-3 ever products that could be shown to even work, was a reverse-engineered free PC Magazine utility (a dozen lines of code) that purposely fragmented memory below 640K so that no DOS TSR could grab more than about 10K of RAM.

Syncronys Softcorp stole its one functional component line-for-line ... including the worthless no-op instructions put in there just to identify the actual author.

Actually, even with Gigabit ethernet availability HPTC and other network intensive data center operations have moved to Fibre Channel and things like:

Infiniband http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infiniband

and Myrinet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myrinet

http://h20311.www2.hp.com/HPC/cache/276360-0-0-0-1 21.html
HP HPTC site

-What's the speed of dark?

Keep in mind that support varies between distros, as well. I got a Ralink-based PCMCIA wireless card for my laptop last fall, and found that Debian, Suse, and Knoppix did not support it, even though Ralink themselves had released GPL drivers for it. To quote HP's Linux wireless page: Like for the RT2400, Ralink wrote a Linux driver for the RT2500 and RT2750, but this time they decided to release it themselves as GPL. Moreover, the driver is functional, full of features and with a graphical utility, so this represent a very generous contribution to the OpenSource community.

Yes, I tried both testing and unstable for Debian, and fairly newish versions of Knoppix and Suse LiveEval. I suppose I could have compiled them myself for Debian, but I want to avoid that kind of hassle.

Luckily, I had a spare partition, and I found that Ubuntu 5.10 (Badger) supported the Ralink card just fine.

Suse LiveEval on the other hand supported my built-in Broadcom chipset, apparently through ndiswrapper.

I must say that I lost some faith in Debian through this. I mean, a company does what we've always asked companies to do - release full GPL drivers, which is more than what other companies in the field have done - and the Debian team did not live up to their expectations. I found out that the drivers had been discussed for inclusion since October of '05, but as of today, May of '06, there are only source packages available for Debian.

• Austin, Texas
  
• Nashville, Tennessee
  
• Eldorado do Sul, Brazil
  
• Limerick, Ireland
  
• Penang, Malaysia
  
• Xiamen, China
  

Or get something that has a little more power, like an HP server with iLO (Integrated Lights Out) Advanced, or an IBM server with the Remote Supervisor Adapter II. You can have complete console control of the remote system, including virtual drives.

As was mentioned in the first post, the main problem to watch out for is WiFi compatibility. Not all manufacturers of wireless cards are good about making their specs available to driver developers. Try the Linux & Wireless LANs page for more information on what works and what doesn't...

..or you could buy new hardware that is certified for your distribution. For example, Mandriva 2006 is certified for several HP business laptops. In our company, we're using HP nc6220 and HP nx8220 models.

For example:
http://h10018.www1.hp.com/wwsolutions/linux/produc ts/clients/clientscert-mandriva.html
http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF25a/3219 57-64295-89315-321838-f33-447371.html
http://www.mandriva.com/en/content/download/10377/ 89934/file/certification-form.pdf

I guess that these laptops would work great with (K)Ubuntu also.

..or you could buy new hardware that is certified for your distribution. For example, Mandriva 2006 is certified for several HP business laptops. In our company, we're using HP nc6220 and HP nx8220 models.

For example:
http://h10018.www1.hp.com/wwsolutions/linux/produc ts/clients/clientscert-mandriva.html
http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF25a/3219 57-64295-89315-321838-f33-447371.html
http://www.mandriva.com/en/content/download/10377/ 89934/file/certification-form.pdf

I guess that these laptops would work great with (K)Ubuntu also.

I got a HP dv1420 on which I am running Fedora Core 5.
http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/genericDocument ?cc=ca&docname=c00500901&lc=en/

As many other posters have said the ipw2200 drivers are open source and in the kernel, though running fedora I know I had to get the actual ipw firmware from livna since it isn't open source. Howver, this didn't appear to be a problem with a live ubuntu cd (I suspect they include them anyway).

The graphics card is a Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 900-, again as other posters have said it's open source and in the kernel (though I couldn't actually get it to work until FC5). The card is decent, good enough to play ppracer on low settings, though on higher settings it got choppy. Also running bzflag only 1/4 of the screen actually showed up. I haven't tested any games other than these two and have no idea of the cards stability/performance under windows.

For a graphics card my reccomendation is thus. If you want some real 3D Linux gaming, go with NVidia. If however your 3D gaming needs are slight/non-existant such as mine are, go with the Intel card. With the Intel card inclusion in the kernel means you don't need to reinstalling everytime you do a kernel upgrade, also I know myself (as well as others) have had stability issues with NVidia drivers in the past. I don't know how much development is going on with the Intel drivers but hopefully most of the bugs will be worked out in the next few months.

Sound worked fine.

As for ACPI it seems to be working well for the moment though I've had minor issues in the past, the only special buttons that work are sound, and I haven't tried the card reader or played with the Bluetooth much (sounds like it could work with fiddling). For the battery using wireless with the screen turned down I can go 2-2.5 hrs (haven't tried without wireless much).

At the end of the day my best suggestion is to get a live Ubuntu cd, head down to a computer store, and see if they let you boot it (the only store that didn't let me do so was BestBuy). That lets you actually see most of what works and what doesn't work, of course there is additional stuff you can get working with fiddling (or even by just running an update) but the more things that just work the better.

I was one of the lucky 15 in my town who got an HP ze2000 from Wally-World the morning after last Thanksgiving, for $400 out the door.

Ndiswrapper works the Broadcom wireless nicely, the ATI driver gives me 3D screensavers, the sound works, and I even spent a couple of hours getting the modem working just to see if I could.

I sprung an extra $50 for another 512MB of RAM. I'm loving the crap out of this thing...

If it's cheap, then Netapp might not qualify... :)

What about technologies - NAS? Host-attached? Gateway/NAS? Grids?

Other companies/products to consider:

EMC (The Celerra is a nice product)

Onstor Bobcat

HP

IBM

Hitachi

Panasas

Exanet

Yotta Yotta

StoreAge

If you want basic raid devices look at Infortrend/Transtec. Their S-ATA offerings now support RAID-6 and are dirt cheap.

What the author is telling us it that he bought a PC from HP, but he clicked the left ("Windows") button instead of the right ("Linux") button. Then he had trouble switching on his own.

The answer to his problems was very simple: click the right button.

Next week's article: "I clicked the right button when I meant to click the left button. Then I had to pay another $200 for Windows and spend hours getting all my hardware working all by myself."

My suggestion is TEST IT yourself, to help you make your decision on how to do it.
But know you need to answer the following at least first:

What kind of server are you going to run? Windows TS, Citrix, or Linux? If you're a Windows Admin who knows user management, Active Directory, and GPOs already, then the learning curve is shortest to the Windows TS. Citrix will mean learning it as a whole new server application. And Linux will mean knowing Linux and having apps that run on Linux.

What kind of thin client are you going to run? The thin client has to support connecting to the type of server you chose. Besides Linux thin clients, which by the way can connect to Windows TS using "rdesktop", and do so quite well, there are two kinds of Windows thin clients, CE and XP-embedded. OH, and just because you know Windows desktop OS's, don't think that immediately translates to knowing how to configure Windows thin clients, CE or XP-embedded. They are a wholly separate beasts.

And then you have to decide if you are going to centrally manage the images of the thin clients or not. You can configure them each individually, or you can set up a PXE server, and boot your thin clients from images you've prepared and stored there. I think some thin clients can be set to autoload their images from FTP or TFTP servers also. But centralized thin client management is a whole other project that you may not have the resources to implement and maintain.

As someone else on this thread mentioned, you have to know if the applications you want to run in this setup will run in the server/client configuration you choose. And the only way to know this, may be to try it. For example I'm currently implementing and ERP application, that won't run via the Windows CE thin clients, but will run via the Windows XP-embedded thin clients. (But I'm running them via Linux thin clients.)

Remember you can test your thin clients with the administrative TS that comes with every Windows server.

Here you'll find examples here of some decent thin clients:
http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF04a/1245 4-321959-89307-338927-89307.html/ There are plenty of others.

I'm using the HP t5525 Linux Thin Client with Windows Server 2003 R2 Terminal Services. This works great. I don't have time right now to deal with the central administration of images, so I spent a morning figuring out how I wanted to configure the t5525, and listed out instructions on how exactly to end up with the same config each time we need to configure one manually. Two of us set up a room of 10 of these, unpacking, hooking up, and configuring, and test connecting to Win TS in 40 minutes.

I tried a t7510. It would be a great "grandparent PC" for a grandparent with broadband who wanted to web-browse (and maybe get sued by RIAA by downloading music and videos to play in Windows Media Player). But it was too quirky and different from XP-desktop to know instantly how to configure/maintain it. And again, I didn't need all the crap it came pre-loaded with. This is supposed to a "thin client" running apps on the TS, not a "thin client" running apps on itself.

Anyways, the cost of the thin-clients is so low, you really ought to get a couple and try them yourself, before you commit to your grand solution.

One thing I am regularly being asked about by business users is a device that can output PowerPoint presentations to a projector, but with the unit being smaller than a laptop and bigger than a PDA - the users want something low-cost (around £300-£400 max), but with the business functionality they need: ie: ability to check and send mail, Web browse (we use SugarCRM, a Web-based CRM package), do some simple word processing and, of course, display PowerPoints. It doesn't need to be a full PC, but needs to fit the requirements.

The ideal unit size would be 1/2 laptop (ie: A5 paper size footprint) - something like the good old HP Jornada 820.

The sticking point is the usual compromise between size, cost and functionality - miniature laptops will do but come in at around £800-1300+, other 'specialist' devices (some of the Psion range) are being phased out and then it's back to PDAs - we did once use an iPAQ 3970 with CF jacket and a VGA out card but the PowerPoint functionality wasn't too hot and you end up carrying round a separate keyboard if you want to to any level of WP beyond quick notes.

The Pepper Pad isn't a working solution from the specs (no VGA output - only composite (of which I am wary when it comes to projector interfacing due to degraded image quality), but it has spurred me to poll the /. collective's wisdom to see whether there is anything out there worth considering?

I did have a quick loop at the PSP (you can store PPTs as a series of linked JPEGs), but the proposed keyboard attachment seems to have been iced and I cannot see any form of external video interface.

Anything spring to mind guys?

Thanks

PS: 'Guys' is taken to be non-gender specific as I understand some of the /. crowd are (shock!) not male!

It's Saturday, you don't have to sip the anti-koolaid today.

What you wrote might be true if the program was restricted to recycling old Macs. This program covers any computer; the only requirement is that you purchase a new Mac to participate. More details. More info.

HP, AFAIK, charges a small fee to recycle your computer.

If you're going to slag on companies, at least get your info straight. Then you'll have some factual basis for your cynicism.

It has also survived multiple mortar attacks

I wonder if anyone has tried that for real. Some sort of multiple server system up and running when someone puts a bullet through one without the system missing a beat. Now that's a video that would get some attention, both for the insanity and technical merit.


Funny you should say that. HP just did it with their high end storage array. See here.

Cluster systems are configured by connecting multiple systems with a communications medium, referred to as an interconnect. OpenVMS Cluster systems communicate with each other using the most appropriate interconnect available. In the event of interconnect failure, OpenVMS Cluster software automatically uses an alternate interconnect whenever possible. OpenVMS Cluster software supports any combination of the following interconnects:

CI (computer interconnect) (Alpha and VAX)

DSSI (Digital Storage Systems Interconnect) (Alpha and VAX)

SCSI (Small Computer Storage Interconnect) (storage only, Alpha and limited support for I64)

FDDI (Fiber Distributed Data Interface) (Alpha and VAX)

Ethernet (10/100, Gigabit) (I64, Alpha and VAX)

Asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) (emulated LAN configurations only, Alpha only)

Memory Channel (Version 7.1 and higher only, Alpha only)

Fibre Channel (storage only, Version 7.2-1 and higher only, I64 and Alpha only)

iPAQ hw6515 is a step in the right direction: it is a PDA with an ability to make phone calls. It has PocketPC OS with its advantages and disadvantages. You can make phone calls, surf the web, listen to MP3s, send e-mails, take photos and find out where you are - yes, it has a GPS module, too. The "qwerty" keyboard is quite handy and beats T9 systems without a doubt. The software has few quirks and takes few days to learn. Setting up secure email submission is difficult if not outright impossible but I guess this was never MS priority.

Try reading this(i used to have a hp workstations @ work a few years ago) or other similar guides on the internet.
A few important points according to me:
1. make sure that your chair and table height are correct/comfortable for you, you should not have to bend forward (refer to ergo guide for what correctness means)
2. invest in a good chair with sufficient lumbar support & hand rest, should cost around $150 (adjustible arm-rests wud be great too)
3. make sure that the keyboard and mouse are placed properly, if required get one of those ultra adjustible keyboards especially if you are going to be typing all day.
4. take frequent breaks (and that doesnt imply reading /.)
5. try to get some exercise for you back wrists and neck atleast a few times a week, dont ignore any pain in joints (could be CTS)

Why do you care? So Dell doesn't sell the computer you want/need at a price you want to pay. So buy a computer from someone else. HP sells laptops without Windows for $50 less than the exact same version with Windows. And they officially support several Linux distros running on them. I'm sure there's a lot of other vendors that do the same.

This is the way the marketplace is supposed to work. Stop whining about Dell being all mean and dumb and "an evil corporation". Vote with your wallet, not your mouth.

Disclaimer: I do not work for HP, or own HP stock, but I do buy their Opteron servers on occasion.

1. Obtain an OpenVMS Alpha system.

2. Read the docs.

3. Install the patches.

4. Let 'em try their damnedest to break in.

5. TEH WIN!!!!!1111

1. Obtain an OpenVMS Alpha system.

2. Read the docs.

3. Install the patches.

4. Let 'em try their damnedest to break in.

5. TEH WIN!!!!!1111

As the former sysadmin of the Test Drive Program, I can say pretty definitively that Test Drive has been around for years - since before Compaq bought Digital, I believe. It's nice to see it mentioned, since I know the folks in MRO work pretty hard to keep it going. My admittedly biased feeling on the subject is that Test Drive is a pretty good place where anyone can go to try out operating systems and software on HP hardware to which they might not otherwise have access. They also make sure there are compilers on each system, so you can try our own code on other platforms as well. You can also check out the definitive list of current systems in the program.

As the former sysadmin of the Test Drive Program, I can say pretty definitively that Test Drive has been around for years - since before Compaq bought Digital, I believe. It's nice to see it mentioned, since I know the folks in MRO work pretty hard to keep it going. My admittedly biased feeling on the subject is that Test Drive is a pretty good place where anyone can go to try out operating systems and software on HP hardware to which they might not otherwise have access. They also make sure there are compilers on each system, so you can try our own code on other platforms as well. You can also check out the definitive list of current systems in the program.

Errr... okkkk... you must be a debian user (which uses exim) - as an example the following use sendmail as their default MTA:

Solaris
HP-UX
RedHat
Suse
Slackware