Slashdot Mirror

Email regarding advertising (marketing people will take notice about bad PR).
http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/hpads/contactus. html

Email Carly (probably /dev/null but you never know).
http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/execteam/email/fiorina/in dex.html

Email regarding advertising (marketing people will take notice about bad PR).
http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/hpads/contactus. html

Email Carly (probably /dev/null but you never know).
http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/execteam/email/fiorina/in dex.html

HP Recalls

Dell Recalls

Make sure never to buy from them either, since aparently a company admitting a problem and fixing it for free is too much for you to deal with. While your at it, make sure to sell any vehicle you own, as it is likely that company has also issued recall notices on some of their products. Next up, make sure to avoid the grocery stores. They have recall notices posted all the time too.

As a general rule, for older systems, you need SCSI disk and CD, something that supports the full SCSI standard. You a PWS "u" is the same as a PWS with a SCSI controller/disk. Check google groups (comp.os.vms) for advice on these upgrades. Some of the newer Alphas understand IDE now.

The neat thing about OpenVMS and Alpha is that in the rare case when a system does crash you can log a call and HP will have someone do a byte by byte crawl through the crash dump and tell you what happened. If it's an o/s problem, VMS Engineering will fix it. If it's a hardware problem, you get an error log with useful diagnostic information.

My big cluster has 3 downtime incidents in the last 6 years, 2 operating system upgrades and frozen fuel line in the generator during an extended power outage. Individual systems have gone down, but never all at once.

While such language is common on Creative Commons-licensed stuff, in this case it's almost like the author is saying "Here is my first cut of a document I'd like to see produced, everyone else please edit it, fill in the ( huge ) gaps, give it some actual content and substance. Thanks."

It's the literary equivalent of setting up an open source software project with a not-really-functional 'prototype' codebase and hoping someone makes it actually work.

I know the topic of P2P ( and more generally, 'file sharing' ) has been studied by tons of smart folks at universities and corporations alike, what about some links to some of those? Oddly enough, the 'study' just has links to ( mostly ) opinion pieces and blogs ( including, of all things, a slashdot article ).

To speak to the parent posts' points of

the author doesn't distinguish between "P2P" and "people trading copyrighted data against the owner's wishes". This manifesto seems to perpetuate the myth that "P2P" is a synonym for "piracy".

Frankly, copyright-protected files are the most common files found on P2P networks. Rather than hiding from reality, we should seek to understand what reality means. In this case, I think reality means that copyright is a generally unenforcable law - like many other laws on the books, it's an example of bad law which in the long run wastes taxpayer money for the ( dubious ) benefit of a small segment of the population.

Copyright infringment is an old, old problem, vastly pre-dating the internet. Even without filesharing, there'd be lots of "piracy", as it's now labeled. As long as there is copyright protection for easily copied items, there will be piracy. It's a law which is extremely difficult to enforce- at best.

I like style. I just can't stand Apple's style. That white is just painful to look at.

Here's an example of one case in which style matters: I've been looking for a laptop. Lately, I've been eyeing the Acer Aspire 1520 series. I have two reasons: one is that I love the specs (at least on the UK model, not the US model), but the other is that it's just plain beautiful to look at. To contrast, the HP Pavilion zv5000z has very similar specs, but it's just plain fugly, so it's out of the running. In fact, I refuse to buy HP products because of how ugly they are.

I agree. The originator of said article is not an enterprise-class corporate culturist. As a solutions provider he needs to refocus his agility optimizations into enabling paradigm-shifting synergistic total-needs marketing alignments. But all brainspace team leaders need scalable workforce management solutions integrated into an accessible, transformative strategy schema to meet the needs of today's dynamic shifting market realities. After all, how else would you leverage your maximized efficiency into accelerated profitable growth measures without sacrificing your time to market or your intense competitive focus? Your small and mid-sized business segments deserve better streamlined business alliances and highly adaptable world-class capabilities, with one-stop, one-call complete managed IT accelerated solutions implementation experts.

If you think I'm making this up, check out Hewlett Packard's press release section.

I once worked on a pilot for a project to deploy HP Digital Senders to remote locations for scanning documents and uploading them to a central european document archive onto WORM media. They have some useful remote configuration software that makes it easy to manage a "fleet" of them in one go, and they have several different options for user management. They're not cheap however. Might be worth investigating - though I don't know if they're customisable enough for your needs.

I used to work for an enterprise data center that had about 3000 servers. We had a discrete management network for remote management and small localized KVM solutions - 1 terminal switches up to 16 servers. This was a pure switchbox approach - no ip network involved. Apparently we could have cascaded up to 64 servers. Anyway, the point I wanted to make is that KVM solutions can be amazingly finicky. Even when they are robust, you still have to deal with operators who might switch cables around and forget to switch them back and before you know it, you have a disaster on hand. Our solution - a customized version of a folding TFT-keyboard-mouse that fits into 1U. Most rack companies will have this in one form or another, like this HP RKM . We had 5 of these around for emergencies.

Ignoring the other remote solutions, such as integrated Lights Out (iLO), the Remote Integrated Lights Out or the IP console switches available... The HP product is called a TFT5600RKM. It is similar to a basic laptop, but without the "guts" - no OS, software, etc. It just has a keyboard, trackball, TFT display and PS/2 ports and video out to connect to a KVM. See http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/1085 3_na/10853_na.HTML

And why stop there? I think some people might like to store the songs they purchased from the iTunes Music Store on the media hub. However, HP would probably need to use an "illegal" hack to deal with Apple's DRM in Linux.

The story's submitter wrote: Since HP also sells self-branded iPods, it would be great if they'd make such a box iPod friendly.

Since HP also bundles and promotes the use of iTunes on their PCs, shouldn't he be asking Apple to make the iPod more Linux-friendly?

Perhaps they did some research into the marketability of an "HP blue" iPod and decided to call that off... after all, you can always buy the iPod Tattoo kit and print up your own blue umm... those are stickers, right? Yea, that's what I want to do, cover my iPod with stickers...

Oh, so that's the other thing you can do with a history degree.

Apparently, all you need is a history degree to run a major corporation (...into the ground)

I don't even know what OS will support a TB of RAM!

How 'bout something like this:

http://h71000.www7.hp.com/

VMS on Alpha (and soon-to-be Itanium) can support memory over a TB of RAM (your wallet will give out before VMS runs out of address space).

The largest VMS system I have managed had 32GB of RAM onboard.

Thanks,
-Scott

According to the specs you linked, they used server-grade Intel(R) PRO/10GbE LR NICs which cost more than a whole PC. They point out that one of the machines "only has a 100 MHz PCI-X bus(!)" but that's a lot faster than whatever is on your desktop, and it comes on a server-grade motherboard (see here under "Will new PCI-X cards be compatible in conventional PCI based systems?").

These guys called the machines PCs, but they obviously spent a big wad of cash on server-grade I/O busses. The result:

"[T]he PCI-X bus and the memory bandwith in the end hosts are currently the bottlenecks."

I'd say networkBoy has some idea what he's talking about.

Think about it for a second. When someone says "no PC and exceptionally few server class machines" can do something, are you going to disprove them by pointing to the world record holders?

The most successful example is Tandem. For decades, systems that have to keep running have run on Tandem's operating system. For an overview of how they did it, see the 1985 paper Why Computers Stop and What Can Be Done About It.

The basic concepts are:

• All the permanent state is in a database with proper atomic restart and recovery mechanisms.
• Flat "files" are implemented on top of the database, not the other way round.
• When applications fail, they are usually restarted completely, with any in-process transactions being backed out.
• Applications with long-running state are tracked by a watching program on another machine which periodically receives state updates from the first program. If the first program fails, the watching program restarts it from a previous good state.

Every time you use an ATM or trade a stock, somewhere a Tandem cluster was involved.

Tandem's problem was that they had rather expensive proprietary hardware. You also needed extra hardware to allow for fail-operational systems. But it all really does work. HP still sells Tandem, but since Carly, it's being neglected, like most other high technology at HP.

And don't forget Carly Fiorina, who, as CEO, turned a minor electronics company into one of the most interesting companies around.

Yes, I am trolling...

Does this mean less resiliency/redundancy in the chip?

Yes - this is the primary reason that Intel is moving to OUM after the 45nm node (slide #32). Do note that this is still years off. OUM is rad-hard.

Also note that the research which is poured into XY-addressable OUM/chalcogenide memory can be potentially useful for the seek and scan memory that is also mentioned in that Intel presentation. My guess is that they'll come out with at leaset one variation or possibly both. The chalgogenide material is the same stuff used for RW optical media - you can change the phase via the application of energy (electrical, optical or otherwise). The change in phase causes many of the properties of the material to change, delineating unique, detectable states.

The probe storage is similar to a CD-RW but, instead of spinning the media below a single optical read/write mechanism, they are moving the media beneath thousands of atomic resolution probes that read/write with electrical energy. It is quite the technology.

HP says to expect it by 2006. Wow!

Except for the glass part, you mean like these: http://www.netapps.com/products/filer/fas200_ds.ht ml? Or these http://www.hp.com/products1/storage/products/disk_ arrays/midrange/va7410/index.html? Or these http://www-1.ibm.com/servers/storage/disk/ds4000/d s4500/index.html? Real freakin' futuristic.

Apple's iPod hardware buddy HP seems to sell might-look-good-in-white, curiously out-of-stock bluetooth stereo headphones, but without a mic. Hmmm...

Right now it triples the price of a switch. (Compare the 2626 and 2626-PWR, for example.)

So no.

I recently bought an hp 325 and have been extremely pleased with the results. I specifically bought it because it is only for small format (4x6) digital photography and is very easy to use (a must for the wife). I do most of my printing from Picasa, but my wife likes to just plug the CF card into the printer and scroll through the images on screen.

As far as quality is concerned, the images are very crisp, with nice colors and brightness. Metallic images look great and blacks are very nice. If you're looking for an easy to use, high image quality photo printer, I recommend this line.

AMD Sempron(TM) 3000+ (2.0GHz 333MHz); 80GB disk,7200 RPM; 256 MB RAM (which is plenty to run FreeDOS), etc. I don't think it includes the monitor. Which does make it quite a bit more expensive than a similar white box machine you could buy in China. Of course, the white box comes loaded with anything you want at no extra charge, so they're sidestepping the hopeless task of trying to compete with these for software.

The Williams team also uses a scupercomputer to do a lot of their modelling, thanks to one of their major sponsors HP and a Linux supercomputer.

I'm hoping more tech-savy slashdot readers can help me understand a couple things. I read cringely's article, got interested by the PowerPC servers that IBM are selling, looked at them on IBM's site, and was surprised that the cheapest one was $5000, for a 1.5 Ghz CPU, 512 memory and 36 GB SCSI HD.

Can someone explain to me how this is competitive? I understand that mhz isn't everything, and PPC is 64 bit, but for that much money I can buy Five Rackmount Dell 2.4 Ghz Xeon pizza boxes with similar specs, or a single Dual Xeon Tower with 6x73 GB SCSI in Raid 5 config, 2 GB Ram, & Tape backup. Perhaps the best comparison is an AMD Opteron 1U with 1 GB memory, only I can buy 3 Opteron servers.

I'm no fan of Dell, but I would choose them (or HP, etc) over an IBM PPC box for $5k. If you are someone who would chose the IBM PPC, I'd like to know your thoughts and what you see as advantages, given the price. Thanks

Not quite a workstation, but certainly not a supercomputer: an rx8620 can comfortably hold that in memory and kick it around fairly quickly. There are users (defense, oil/gas) who need to deal interactively with many-gigabyte datasets. I don't know if anyone would want a single bitmap of that size though.

This is a seriously nice laptop. Great screen, excellent performance, very well built. I would put it on par with a Thinkpad any day.

If Micro$oft made a handheld console it would be as large and heavy as a brick.

Yeah, those 5 oz bricks are pretty hefty.

that seems to indicate that while Sun shouldn't worry about Apple, the "Big 3" shouldn't worry about Sun.

You also need to consider Sun's target consumer too. Plenty of small businesses have no need nor would consider buying a Sun. Hell, for what I do in my own home I should consider buying something that would be classified as a "server" but I certainly don't need a Sun nor would it fit my needs as well as something like this. Take a look, it's pretty much a glorified PC being sold as a server. Not to say that Sun doesn't have the same style of machine in their "server" list but consider that people are much more likely to go Windows in the small server market.

A link to the actual device, not a generic (non-working) store link.

HP Vivera inks are advertised to last up to 115 years when used with HP premium photo paper.

That is what happens when you make a History major who only cares about her personal income the CEO of your company.

You conveniently left out the two more important parts of her education from her biography:

Fiorina holds a master's degree in business administration from the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland at College Park, Md., and a master of science degree from MIT's Sloan School.

According to this HP page their Itanium servers have the best price to performance ratio in the industry.
HP Server

Of course I know we have .co.uk - but we don't have .com.uk

Large companies do register addresses in most useful domains to ensure they catch everyone, I don't see anything wrong with this, and even the forwarding if done cleverly allows a worldwide corp to run a server farm with subbranches for the different markets.
Like your virgin example, opening http://www.hp.co.uk/ redirects you to http://welcome.hp.com/country/uk/en/welcome.html

In other replies to my original posting, I have just seen another example of a country level domain using .com. as 2nd level (brazil) but thankfully its relatively rare in the world (at least the sites I visit), and tbh seems like a silly usage, especially in the way that .com has come to be associated.

perhaps a .au.com or .br.com would have been better.

Microsoft in the UK are just about to start doing something equally silly, their venerable hotmail domain which is stuffed to the rafters is going to be extended. You will be able to get a hotmail.co.uk address. How many mistakes will be made with addressing? The wordspeak is generally "its liquidcoooled at hotmail" even if people KNOW theres a difference, the majority of direct sent mail will end up incorrectly on the .com domain.

Perhaps though its just me being lazy :)

Here's my answer to requests for tech support: "I work with these:

(http://www.sun.com/servers/highend/sunfire15k/i ndex.xml
http://www.hp.com/products1/servers/scalableserver s/superdome/index.html)
at work

and (http://www.apple.com/powerbook/) at home.

I don't know crap of about that cheap piece of plastic junk you're using."

...show me one place a "normal" person can buy a Linux machine like Dell, Gateway, or HP.

HP
Dell

Ok.

1. Dell and Dell

2. HP

And if you want "shops" that sell Linux systems: Try here

Obviously a quick google will find even more!

The problem is that people think a "pc" is "windows". They simply don't know any better. Sure, the thing becomes trashed by spyware and viruses within hours and thats when the go and see "the guy who knows about computers". By then of course, they have already spent their money and may or may not take Microsoft Windows back to the shop as "not fit for purpose". They can't see that the TCO for a Microsoft Windows system is a lot higher than the alternatives.

Debian really needs a "grown up" large company to provide commercial support, that will quiet the fears of managers.

Is HP, grown up enough? http://www.hp.com/hps/linux/lx_debian.html

Don't mention Celeron. I don't know why Intel keep on releasing it ... In today's market I just don't understand the need to have a low-end Celeron line.

They give low-budget a new low.

What's even worse are the laptop Celerons, which perform like 486 chips relabeled.

I'm not saying that Intel hasn't released some stinkers under their "Celeron" label. The Pentium 4-based Celerons sucked when they only had 128K of L2 cache, but now they have 256K and the Prescott core. Recent notebook Celerons had the same core as those sucky desktop Celerons, but now they use the highly-praised Pentium M core.

Two years ago, desktop and notebook Celerons did suck. But now, Dell offers a Celeron D desktop with PCI-Express (915G chipset) for $568. HP/Compaq sells a $599 notebook with a Dothan-based Celeron M. I think that's pretty good performance and technology for those prices.

Xeon boxes can go above 4GB of RAM... for example, the HP DL560 does 4 Xeon CPUs and 12 GB of RAM.

They're really nice boxes

Frankly, I'm looking for the opposite: an Athlon 64 laptop with nVidia video, and they're incredibly bloody rare.

There are only three such laptops I know of: the Acer Aspire 1520 series, the Asus L5000D series, and the Compaq R3000Z (identical to the HP zv5000z).

Right now, the Acer is looking like my best bet. The Compaq/HP is out because I really can't stand how horribly ugly HP's case designs are--I'd rather not have a laptop that makes me ill to look at. The Asus is out because of the insane price--both the Acer and the Compaq/HP come out to around $1200 or so, but the Asus is around $3000. Only problem is that I have no idea how well the Acer works with Linux--there's literally no information on it and Linux out there. It's also primarily sold in the UK--I've only found one American company selling it.

Oh, well--maybe in a few months there'll be more AMD64+nVidia laptops out there...

Frankly, I'm looking for the opposite: an Athlon 64 laptop with nVidia video, and they're incredibly bloody rare.

There are only three such laptops I know of: the Acer Aspire 1520 series, the Asus L5000D series, and the Compaq R3000Z (identical to the HP zv5000z).

Right now, the Acer is looking like my best bet. The Compaq/HP is out because I really can't stand how horribly ugly HP's case designs are--I'd rather not have a laptop that makes me ill to look at. The Asus is out because of the insane price--both the Acer and the Compaq/HP come out to around $1200 or so, but the Asus is around $3000. Only problem is that I have no idea how well the Acer works with Linux--there's literally no information on it and Linux out there. It's also primarily sold in the UK--I've only found one American company selling it.

Oh, well--maybe in a few months there'll be more AMD64+nVidia laptops out there...

Not that I'm fond of them as a company or anything, but my employer buys thousands of HP's servers, and HP has been selling Opteron-based servers (e.g.) for some while now. Even if AMD never achieved sufficient penetration with ia32, there's some hope that they'll gain some of the ephermeral credibility by being first to market with a workable ia32-compatible 64-bit architecture.

Here is HP's nx5000 notebook preloaded with SuSE 9.1:
nx5000

Try this link instead. The laptop apparently comes with "SUSE® Linux HP Edition 9.1". Odd. Wonder what they've modified.

Acidus writes "I called around today to the big OEMs (Gateway, Dell, HP, IBM) ... While no one offered Linux preloaded on laptops...

Dunno who you talked to dude, but HP has been selling a linux-preloaded laptop (the nx5000 for quite a while now. It's gotten quite a few nice reviews as well:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5831949/
http://reviews-zdnet.com.com/HP_Compaq_Business_No tebook_nx5000___Linux_configurable_/4505-3121_16-3 0816347.html

Aw heck, just do a google search yourself...

I'm not sure what was contained in various previous offerings, but currently HP has begun offering a home media center running Microsofts offering. It seems to be the DVR + everything but the kitchen sink.

Here is a link to the offering from HP. Seems a little expensive, but I haven't seen one in person to know exactly how powerful it is.

I've talked with friends about building a simple linux system to do all this and interface it with a home LAN, and we all agree that you could do it for a lot less than 2 grand.

The current program is at the stage where commercialization is possible by 2006. The storage segment first addressed is portable storage of between 2 and 10 gigabytes. (SD card form factor).

The current program is at the stage where commercialization is possible by 2006. The storage segment first addressed is portable storage of between 2 and 10 gigabytes. (SD card form factor).