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Bristol (UK) is home to the second largest HP Labs in the world. They have also been involved in some fun wireless projects around the city. By fun, I mean "open networks connected to JANET". (here's one)

I was under impression that mono has switched to a modern generational garbage collector, the Intel ORP GC. But the current beta uses the conservative boehm garbage collector.

A conservative GC is nice for a quick hack, but it really does not cut it for a modern VM.

So which one will it use in mono 1.0? Boehm or ORP? And if it is the boehm collector, what plans are there to switch to a modern GC?

By the way: the conservative garbage collector is the only real technical flaw of mono. Other than that it is quite a modern VM. Quite amazing for this short development time...

--

Am I the only one that thinks of Root Mean Square when I see RMS?

Well, I think of OpenVMS Record Management Services which, as I hope you all know, is what you use to access files in VMS.

Hi Jamie,

Bob Bickel mentions a stack based on RH or SUSE.
Why hasn't HP certified Debian for its servers (proliant)? It's not like it isn't stable.
It seems like you're already using it yourselves. I know there are various hacks with alien to get it working but they're not the kind of thing I'd want to see documented in a SOP. It doesn't need to be at the level of a PSP installer, a set of debs would do - just official enough for management.
That would be a great "commitment to open source software"...

Call me when they start contributing to the code in a meaningful way

sure

I would really like HP to step up its commitment to open source software by giving equal support to Debian on Proliant as it does to RH & SUSE. HP ships a load of drivers and useful agents (that throttle the fans back to something bearable) as rpms with a nice installer, but which works with supported distros only, AFAIK. Some people have managed the install indirectly using alien and a kernel recompile but surely HP can do better when they apparently use Debian as their internal development platform. It can't be stability issues with Woody, surely?

I would really like HP to step up its commitment to open source software by giving equal support to Debian on Proliant as it does to RH & SUSE. HP ships a load of drivers and useful agents (that throttle the fans back to something bearable) as rpms with a nice installer, but which works with supported distros only, AFAIK. Some people have managed the install indirectly using alien and a kernel recompile but surely HP can do better when they apparently use Debian as their internal development platform. It can't be stability issues with Woody, surely?

Cooltown was (and perhaps is, although the web site seems to have been diverted toward another program) a research project, not a product line, generally looking at interesting uses for web-connected mobile devices. (But it's probably fair to say the research hasn't obviously engendered a swarm of web-connected mobile device products from HP.)

You know, the "in 64-bit mode" also applies to IA64, as while IA64 can hardly be described has having evolved from a 32-bit architecture (resemblence to PA-RISC notwithstanding),

...said resemblance not being a huge surprise, given that I think it started out as an HP project.

it supports a 32-bit userland (for example, running HP-UX with HP tools).

...although the 32-bit userlands that IA-64 supports are 32-bit PA-RISC (via, I think, binary-to-binary translation) and x86 (via hardware and, I think, either a current or planned binary-to-binary translation mechanism), not any 32-bit flavor of IA-64. It might also support 64-bit PA-RISC (again, via translation), and it might be amusing to see binary-to-binary translation for x86-64. :-)

HP are porting OpenVMS to IA-64, with Alpha->IA-64 translation (they might be doing VAX->IA-64 by VAX->Alpha->IA-64, using the existing VAX->Alpha translator).

Riiiight. Commercial product off of OSS.

May I direct you to a few companies/products that seem to be doing well in this regard:

• MySQL
• Trolltech (Qt)
• Apple's MacOS X
• Nokia's IPSO platform (based on FreeBSD)

I'm sure other slashdot readers can provide further examples. The trick with GPL-based OSS and generating revenue, is to provide value-add (which may be through commercial closed-source tools). Alternatively, the tried and true position is through services, which IBM and HP seem to have figured out.

Martin Fink, VP of HP - "HP is not running a religious jihad"...
Zonix - "Am I the only one who is concerned about this bad analogy?"

You're not alone; given the current political climate it is a highly insensitive phrase to use, however, my understanding is that jihad literally means struggle. Recently it has become synonymous with holy war, largely due to its adoption by terrorist groups who justify their atrocities through misdirected religious fervour.

Similarly, evangelism has been misappropriated from Christian texts to suggest entirely reasonable and unswerving support.

More enlightened people may wish to speak in terms of a campaign for Linux adoption and steer clear of ill educated religious waffle; this includes Martin Fink, VP of HP.

Bonus point if anyone can find an apology and retraction on the web.

Well HP doesn't own their own platform like IBM does with WebSphere. However, they do support plenty of other solutions.

I think HP is taking the right approach by saying to customers: what software would you like to use on linux? Oracle? BEA? We'll support it for you. IBM seems to always want to impose Websphere, is that the better approach? There's plenty of software competition in this area, if HP were to introduce their own software they would:

- alienate microsoft
- fail at getting a wide userbase.

Seems to me like they have a sound strategy...

Actually I can... well not beowulf, per se, but there was a large farm used to turn out the frames.

Between in house and off site boxes, there were a lot of cpus thrown at this.

Goodness, I love my job...

-Tim

[ed note: We love you Jean Tourrilhes!]

As you may have known, or guessed from the context, Jean Tourrilhes is involved in all things Linux/Wifi. He has written a great deal of code and documentation on the subject, not to mention research papers.
See more at his page.

Windows was definitly not a generic term in 1985.

Of course it was.

Otherwise, why would HP have called the proprietary windowing system for their 1985 portable Unix workstation "HP Windows" ?

whoa whoa, No innovation left? Hello Mcfly.

Deskjet 5850 - Built in Wired/Wireless printing Who else offers this?

PSC Photosmart 2510 - Wired and Wireless Printing Scanning Faxing Memory Card uploading Same here? And don't say there's "no demand" for it. Don't.

Photosmart 7960 - 8 Ink printing system AND features the Number 59 GRAY ink cartridge for AMAZING printouts with 3 levels of gray. Amazing.

Well? All I see is innovation.

whoa whoa, No innovation left? Hello Mcfly.

Deskjet 5850 - Built in Wired/Wireless printing Who else offers this?

PSC Photosmart 2510 - Wired and Wireless Printing Scanning Faxing Memory Card uploading Same here? And don't say there's "no demand" for it. Don't.

Photosmart 7960 - 8 Ink printing system AND features the Number 59 GRAY ink cartridge for AMAZING printouts with 3 levels of gray. Amazing.

Well? All I see is innovation.

whoa whoa, No innovation left? Hello Mcfly.

Deskjet 5850 - Built in Wired/Wireless printing Who else offers this?

PSC Photosmart 2510 - Wired and Wireless Printing Scanning Faxing Memory Card uploading Same here? And don't say there's "no demand" for it. Don't.

Photosmart 7960 - 8 Ink printing system AND features the Number 59 GRAY ink cartridge for AMAZING printouts with 3 levels of gray. Amazing.

Well? All I see is innovation.

whoa whoa, No innovation left? Hello Mcfly.

Deskjet 5850 - Built in Wired/Wireless printing Who else offers this?

PSC Photosmart 2510 - Wired and Wireless Printing Scanning Faxing Memory Card uploading Same here? And don't say there's "no demand" for it. Don't.

Photosmart 7960 - 8 Ink printing system AND features the Number 59 GRAY ink cartridge for AMAZING printouts with 3 levels of gray. Amazing.

Well? All I see is innovation.

HP makes laser printers with some help from Canon. Same goes for Apple.

So if HP goes out of business, you could try Canon for printers.

They were the first company to make laser printers with a ozone filter small enough that you could fit your laser printer on the desk, also the first to come out with ink technology , infact I still have my thinkjet, and it still works.

They were the first company to make laser printers with a ozone filter small enough that you could fit your laser printer on the desk, also the first to come out with ink technology , infact I still have my thinkjet, and it still works.

You want an HP Digital sender. It will do color and grayscale scanning of one and two sided documents. It then converts the scanned documents to a PDF file and emails it to wherever you'd like. I use this thing daily at work in order to scan handwritten notes to post on my website. The only downside is these things start at about three thousand dollars.

Will you please tell both of us where we can get one for a few hundred dollars, as specified in the question?

How about this?

Scanner/Copier/Laser Printer with a 50 page document feeder for $400. And you can get an inkjet model for $150.

The really important thing for him to have here, I think, is the document feeder, based on his complaint of having to spend 1-2 minutes per page. Anything else (say, converting tiff to pdf and compressing the whole thing) can be accomplished via software.

The HP Digital Sender series are really great for this stuff. You feed it a stack of paper and it scans it, 15 pages per minute, and can store the PDF on a file server or you can send an email with the PDF attached directly from the network sender! It's a bit expensive, but try to look around for one, maybe the local copyshop? Guan

SuSE and HP work together so for your HP laptop you'll probably see the best support from SuSE. See press release for more.

You can get SuSE for free using the ftp download so don't worry about cost and if you want support later you can still buy it unlike Fedora. Definitely do SuSE if only because it's officially used by HP.

The best available modern system for formal verification is the Extended Static Checking system for Java developed at DEC SRL. This was developed at DEC before HP shut down that research operation. It's still available as a free download.

What all this machinery does is put teeth into "design by contract". With systems like this, you can tell if a function implements its contract, and you can tell if a caller complies with the contract of each thing they call. Before running the program.

Developing in this mode means spending forever getting rid of the static analysis errors. Then, the program usually just runs. That's exactly what you want for embedded systems. But it's painful for low-grade programming like web site development, where "cosmetic errors" are tolerable and time-to-market matters more than correctness.

The productivity savings of me not loosing my notes and paperless are a life saver. I use to be one of those people that would make all my notes on posty notes...then would have like 100s of them...and a 100 more lost!

The cheapest method is one of those keyboard devices that store your keystrokes into memory and have like a 15 character LCD display of what you are writing...of course i forget the product's name...doh! it would hook into your PS/2 keyboard port and download the keystrokes into notepad/Word.

The other method would be a PDA with a keyboard, or a phone with a keyboard.

from the article on HP's site:

Your daughter's first smile. Your son's joy the first time he catches a ball. The wink your favorite uncle always gave you, but that he'd never do on camera.

Uhhhh, WHAT?

...so typical, it almost seems like a troll. I believe this is what the grandparent poster was looking for.

but if Apple doesn't patent this some other company might. Given Apple's involment in the open source community with Darwin, http://www.opensource.apple.com/ , I would rather see them with a patent for this than some company based on patents only.

This is the usual Apple apology. Apple is the "good" company, and otherwise "bad" behavior is OK for them to pursue, since an evil company might patent it first, and we all know that Apple never does anything evil. Oh, and they're involved in open source, too, which makes them even more of a "good" company, unlike some other evil companies who aren't involved in supporting open source at all.

It's all fairly typical of the excuse making by Apple followers who otherwise masquerade as FOSS zealots in other threads.

Take a look at the OS running on the HP workstations you spec'd out

I'm not sure what you mean by 'forced incompatibilities'. Are you saying that it's impossible for two mac users to be 'compatible' without using Microsoft products? If not then that sounds like an option to me.

The rest of your argument seems to revolve around your inability to interoperate in a non-windows world, but as far as I can tell there's no technical or logistical reason (beyond the stubbornness of others) that this is so.

My point is that if you wanted to go totally non-Microsoft then you could, you have the option, nobody's forcing you to use their products. Sure, it may be inconveient for you if you don't, but that's your problem/fault, not theirs.

Did someone say something about 1U servers?

Here you go!

A truly open market will provide options.

• HP
• Apple
• Sun
• Penguincomputing
• pogolinux

Not exactly something you can get from PC World, but this one can have 2 AGP, or there's this one which offers 4 AGP

Not exactly something you can get from PC World, but this one can have 2 AGP, or there's this one which offers 4 AGP

Last time I looked a simple PDA has a 400mhz processor, 64 meg of RAM, a 64k colour screen, multiple expansion sockets and support for WiFi and/or bluetooth.

Hardly simple. You must be thinking of one of those Palm products :o)

Don't be silly, Apple is a very small fish in a very big pond compared to real supercomputer companies like SGI.

What the big companies do is let you login to their machines free of charge, over the internet, and take their machines for a spin. See e.g. http://www.testdrive.compaq.com

On top of that, what the companies with a *serious interest* in high performance computing (like SGI and Cray) do is let you email your program to them: they will spend days or weeks (up to you) tuning it, telling you how it works on their hardware, and even telling you that you're better off with the competition, if that ends up being the case. What these companies understand very well, that Apple doesn't, is that people who spend $10M+ on computing equipment, typically with public money, need to show due diligence in their choice of hardware. This means THOROUGH evaluation: benchmarks, benchmarks, benchmarks - and not _standard_ benchmarks, but the benchmarks that matter: the user's own software.

Take a look here to see a real-life snapshot of this kind of process.

Any company that tried to "fudge the numbers" would be caught out, and that looks VERY bad. So the companies instead do all they can to help with the evaluation process, and hope that they get chosen. If not, there's always the next sale. A big supercomputer is sold somewhere every day or two, after all.

Virginia Tech's "X" doesn't come into this category: for example, no actual scientific work has been performed on the machine so far apart from benchmarks/system development, etc. Dr Varadarajan is probably going to get a pretty nasty grilling in a couple of years, when the University asks "so, what did we get for our money?" Some P.R., and not a whole lot more it would seem. I wish them luck...

Apple is not really a supercomputer company: and really, who cares? Apple has been, is, and will probably remain a great computer company for a good long while yet. But don't expect Apple to help you out a great deal if you pop them an email going "say, how does the G5 run on the ASCI Purple benchmarks?". That's just not what Apple are about. (example: they are happy to sell you a box with a 64-bit CPU, but they could care less that they don't have a 64-bit OS to go with it..)

A Compaq with standard, off-the-shelf components? Wow, it will be like before the company was ruined by HP's love of crappy part integration !!

I know that HP's CoolTown is mainly marketing chum, but at the core was actual research into linking the web to physical items. When you're considering what to do with semacode, you should check out some of the CoolTown IEEE submitted research papers. Oh, and here's a fluffy article on bridging URLs to meatspace.

Right here

At the moment, I'm trying to get a few of these opteron based servers in for testing to run oracle on linux to replace some of our aging unix servers.

Need more horsepower... the Opteron 4-way boxes (HP 4-way), crush the Intel Xeon's (as do the two ways) in most web and DB benchmarks. Oh yeah, they are usually priced comparably or cheaper than the Intels as well.

Need more horsepower... the Opteron 4-way boxes (HP 4-way), crush the Intel Xeon's (as do the two ways) in most web and DB benchmarks. Oh yeah, they are usually priced comparably or cheaper than the Intels as well.

> > Garbage collection for Cocoa?

> It's already there. It's called an autorelease pool, and it's used extensively throughout Foundation Kit.

Er, no. Autorelease pools are nice, but they're not garbage collection. Real GC has to do with whether an object could ever be accessed, not whether it's marked as retained through manual reference-count annotations. C++ destroys non-static local variables when they go out of scope; that's not GC either.

Now, whether Foundation/AppKit (or, really, CoreFoundation) "should" use GC instead of retain-counting is a separate issue.

I have to admit, I don't understand what you mean by "Microsoft-esque". Please elaborate.

For a group that talks about Freedom so much they sure like to dictate what other people do or say

One reason why Freedom is so great is because you can tell people who supposedly care about your opinions what to do. They don't have to do it, which is the other reason why Freedom is so great. However, you also don't have to continue your relationship if its not going your way. Anyone who continues doing so is either a sycophant, or a stooge.

and if they don't lash out against them.

How is making choices and choosing tools lashing out? At the very least, it shows concern for the relationship when an unhappiness is communicated from one party to the other. If it falls on deaf ears, is that the complainant's fault? At least an attempt was made, and often in plenty of time to fix the problem. It would be hypocritical to their own ideals for Open Source proponents to continue to lock their code using a proprietary language/platform when a reasonable alternative matures to the point of practical use.

It's typical of corporate pushers to limit freedom of choice (unprofitable otherwise) and bemoan the situation when one appears, whether by design or by nature, with the potential to be more attractive and closer to the hearts of those they've up to that point held sway over.

Some of the licenses Sun sells will not be valid anymore if Java is GPL'd.

Not true. If people/corporations want Java, they'll use products that are called Java. Very much like if people/corporations want Linux, they'll use products that are called Linux. Anyone who doesn't deal with the owner of the Java name and trademark will have to sell and train people in a product they can't name as everyone else knows it. It's an uphill battle. Find me a corporation that will use a Linux OS that isn't called Linux. You can't do it.

One of the main things is certification and testing to be called Java. If it is GPL'd people can choose to call it something other than Java. They don't have to pay Sun anything. Call it WebsphereVM and WebsphereEE and IBM can do anything they want with the language and Sun gets nothing for it.

If IBM were to try to sell something perceived to be outside an established standard, all that would happen is that every competing vendor would use that as part of their advertising campaign. You can imagine where IBM's mindshare would go regarding a product they couldn't even name as everyone else knows it. Specially considering there are and will be free alternatives that are certified under the JCP. It'll never happen (actually it did with J2EE, but once everyone else [JBoss] was published to follow the standard, all vendors, including IBM, scrambled to match the reference standard).

Think about C or C++, which wasn't under any license, just a late-to-market standard. When competing vendors developed their tools, did they call it Visual D? Or, Visual Age for E? No, they called it C because misrepresenting the product would've been a waste of marketing/training effort and money. And, the competition would've creamed them. No one would buy it. If IBM decided to go on their own, and skip calling it Java (because Sun owns the name/trademark), they couldn't even claim Java compatibility.

Come to think of it, this also actually happened with Java prior to J2EE. It was earlier in its life when the specs were published and it was the new kid on the block. HP decided they were going to make their own cleanroom implementation and simply not bother with licensing the name or getting it certified. Guess what? Nobody came to the party. They eventually relented and got a Sun license. If Java were GPL'd, it would simply be cheaper to work with Sun and the JCP

• Sun Fire V440 --> $16,395
  
• HP DL580 G2 --> $34,374
  

• Sun Fire V440 --> 702/1054/26.5/33.0
  
• HP DL580 G2 --> 1491/1208/61.6/30.7
  

It's easy to generate png/pdf/ps plots and they look really nice.

"You're forgetting who put all those PCs on the government worker desks. it wasn't some kickasss software a Unix vendor or local open source guru developed.

Was a little company from Redmond."

I realize this is a troll, but I'll bite.

The company that put the PCs on the government workers' desks wasn't from Redmond, it was from San Diego, or Austin, or Houston. All three of these companies started without Microsoft, and all three would still be providing computers to government workers, with or without the Redmond bully. (Oh, and Compaq was started by three guys from Texas Instruments, who wanted to design a computer to run all of IBM's (UNIX) software.)

Although it looks funny.

This thing has a 6502 processor?

Can it run Apple II software?

I just have to ask.