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The original 49 was discontinued a while back.

From HP's site
CPU: 75Mhz ARM9 Display Size: 131 x 80 pixels Display type: Pixel Memory: RAM 512KB (330KB available to user), 2MB flash ROM (800KB available to user) IR Port : IrDA Serial port: USB Expansion port: SD card Power Supply: AAA x 3 + CR2032 Auto power OFF: approximately 5 minutes

Why is something completely wrong modded up +5? Its full of errors.

They need to improve the hardware. I don't know if anyone has tried symbolic integration on an HP. It's like those coffee commercials. Walk the dog, check the calculator, learn Dutch, check the calculator. The HP49g+ still runs on a 4 bit bus

Bullshit. The 49g+ has an ARM processor. The bus is 32 bits. You can calculate 299! and the result will display in the blink of an eye (try that on a TI-89). see This {Page for some specs

but TI can actually perform calculations in a reasonable amount of time.

HP's hardware beats the crap out of TI's. You can up 512MB of memory in a 49G+. compare the 2

Read the article link; it supports algebraic. I don't know specifically how with this one, but with the graphing ones, you can use infix (algebraic) notation all you want. Press the ' (single quote) key, and enter it as an expression. Then press EVAL. It's not faster, but infix never was.

According to the spec sheet for the new 33s that the story is about, it in fact DOES use a 6502 . Note CPU.

Wow, how do they manage to "pack" an entire 31K into something that can fit into your shirt pocket!?! Amazing!
Seriously, I'm sure the calculator is fine, but they really need to find some better marketing people.

You might want to take a look at this. It is much faster than the ti89 processor and support both algebraic and RPN mode.

the enlarged image didn't work for me (don't know why). but at last I managed to get it. In case some of you had similar problems - here it is:

http://www.hp.com/calculators/images/33s_350x350.j pg

Why is amazon trying to sell a 30-pack of AAA batteries as an accessory on the product page? According to the specs, it only needs the lithium batteries...

No, you're right. I was replying to a poster whom I'm now certain is some sort of anti-OSS troll (and is thus now on my foes list, grrr). He was trying to be whitty and criticize a "Linux user" for using KDE and the MS-isms therein. I made a simple parody of his post but at least two people seem to have missed my point. Maybe because the original post was soon modded as troll, maybe because my post was so short and I didn't qualify it with an explaination. I simply tried to come up with some "features" of Windows that were developed outside of MS (which isn't hard, really).

An anonymous post got the general gyst though.

• Multitasking - Multics, Unix, VMS. This feature goes way back to time-sharing mainframes. It's probably difficult nowadays to ascertain who really did it first.
• GUI - Xerox PARC, Apple, MIT (X), Acorn RiscOS.
• Mouse - Stanford, Xerox PARC, Apple.
• Audio hardware - erm, not really sure. Apple macs and Amigas had built-in sound hardware long before the x86 PC did.
• Accelerated graphics hardware (2D/3D) - Silicon Graphics, Sun, HP, Apollo, Evans and Sutherland.
• 3D API's - IrisGL/OpenGL, PEX.
• LANs and the Internet - Xerox PARC (LAN concept), 3Com (ethernet), Apple (Appleshare?), Unix (TCP/IP), Novell (IPX/SPX).

Show some respect for your elders, or at least know them ;)

"Looking and behaving better" is partly a matter of what you are used to, and also a reflection on the poor quality of many Java UIs, which is more a reflection on the apps themselves rather than the platform (there are exceptions, demonstrating that Java is capable of being better). If you could have an app that looked and acted exactly the same on all desktop machines, and appropriately differently on palmtop devices (but the same across all such devices), would that be enough to make you want to avoid duplicating all those presentation layers? (I think you underestimate the amount of work involved in producing a good presentation layer, BTW).

The bit I would be interested in is if I was, say, running an IT services company, providing and managing several Linux servers for clients, would I be able to take out the insurance if I was distributing the disputed code?
This might be a cheap way for the smalltime business to mirror the indemnity offered by the likes of HP/Compaq.

The most interesting is why the Founder of D feels it is necessary to compare his language to other languages.

Quote from Bjarne Stroustrup's FAQ: "When looking at a language comparison consider who wrote it, consider carefully if the descriptions are factual and fair,
and also if the comparison criteria are themselves fair for all languages considered. This is not easy."

I tend to agree. A comparison table biasing the featured product makes me feel somewhat suspicious.

Moreover, some of the features where C++ is listed as 'No' are available although GC'ing isn't something I miss much about C/C++

features include...garbage collection...full C compatibility

Now before anyone goes on and on about the existence of GC for C/C++, my definition of "real" GC is that it has to be a NON-conservative, compacting, ephemeral collector. Collectors outside this definition have their place: they help you clean up leaks. But they cannot guarantee two features which are crucial to collectors in any modern language: safety and speed.

Safety. You just can't tell the difference between a pointer and an int in C. Thus there are all sorts of ways of hiding pointers as ints in the language, causing memory leaks. Conversely, if you've encoded a pointer in some way, or have allocated hanging off the edge of a struct (a *very* common occurrance -- Objective-C uses this as its basic objejct storage procedure underneath, or used to) the collector may reap your memory before you're done using it. Ungood.

Speed. One of the things that makes HotSpot kewl is that it moves around memory as it does collection; as a result long-lived objects get compacted together, taking advantage of cache loads. This can't be easily done in GC if it's not allowed to fool with your pointers safely.

The point of garbage collection is to be ubiquitous and invisible. This isn't possible in C/C++.

Consider this: When Real was rolling out product for the past few years, which user base got the fruits of their efforts last?

Mac users, that's who.

So Real has been flinging poo at Mac users for a long time, then when Apple is suddenly the in-crowd, Real wants to jump on the bandwagon.

Simply put, there may be more to Apple & Real's relationship than we know. Perhaps in the past, Glaser has dissed Apple? We don't know... but Jobs may be a bit vindictive, and this is a nice way to kick Real while they're down, 'cause I do recall RealPlayer being slow to support MacOS with updates and features.

Yes, Jobs could have been more political in his comments, but I think this is all to make a point to prospective partners: Apple wants partners who bring something to the table (see: Hewlett-Packard) that doesn't dilute the value of an Apple brand. Real would dilute the iTunes brand, and bring competition that may, in the short term, give choice, but in the end, weaken the "franchise" making it easier for a loss-leading M$ effort to take over in the long run.

We all know the pattern...

1. Come up with a cool idea...
2. Dominate the market...
...
7. Watch Microsoft crush you into oblivion with a freebie included in Windows!

• digital cameras - 300mW is an insane power drain for a camera, instead of draining the battery to download pics, you could attach it wia USB and charge the battery. see my previous post
• printers - 802.11 is the logical way to implement a wireless printer. It's not hard to find a printer with built-in 802.11. You can also find a few portable printers that are USB powered
• scanners - a lot of scanners are powered via USB, also if you are going to make it wireless, you probably want to share it, which again would be up 802.11's alley

My parents are set up with a HP d135 decked out with a 802.11 adapter, this lets them fax ,scan, and print via their 802.11 network. HP sells something similar now pretty cheap.

... even scan pictures.

No. Not if you use e.g. the very common scanner I bought from the Big Linux-friendly Company called HP, that dominates the SOHO scanner market.

I don't even dare to think about how much less than nothing that I would have been able to use a scanner in Linux/SANE if I had bought one from another, less Linux-friendly company... :P

... even scan pictures.

No. Not if you use e.g. the very common scanner I bought from the Big Linux-friendly Company called HP, that dominates the SOHO scanner market.

I don't even dare to think about how much less than nothing that I would have been able to use a scanner in Linux/SANE if I had bought one from another, less Linux-friendly company... :P

True. However, 1PB would require over 5200 of them. Which would in turn require over 650 machines to stick them in (at 8 drives per node, itself probably a tad high since the bus would grind to a crawl in such a machine). All that adds up to at least half of a million dollars.

• include a complete implementation of the current version of this specification without subsetting or supersetting;
• implement all the interfaces and functionality of the required packages of the Java 2 Platform, Standard Edition, as defined by SUN, without subsetting or supersetting;
• pass all test suites relating to the most recent published version of the specification of the Java 2 Platform, Standard Edition, that are available from SUN six (6) months prior to any beta release of the clean room implementation or upgrade thereto;

Here ya go...

You missed a few:

http://www.hp.com/products1/unix/java/

http://h18012.www1.hp.com/java/alpha/

http://www.sgi.com/software/java/

http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/java/jdk/ind ex.html

http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/java/

So it looks like we have JVMs for, at least, Linux, Solaris, Windows, OS X, Irix, AIX, HP-UX, Tru64, OpenVMS, OS/2, and z/OS.

What was the list of platforms for C# and .NET again?

You missed a few:

http://www.hp.com/products1/unix/java/

http://h18012.www1.hp.com/java/alpha/

http://www.sgi.com/software/java/

http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/java/jdk/ind ex.html

http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/java/

So it looks like we have JVMs for, at least, Linux, Solaris, Windows, OS X, Irix, AIX, HP-UX, Tru64, OpenVMS, OS/2, and z/OS.

What was the list of platforms for C# and .NET again?

-C is not object oriented

No, but certainly libraries like GTK2 allow the programmer to perceive the library as object-oriented. Sure, things are going on deep down, but the level the developer actually sees is pretty OO.

-Strict ANSI C is very limited as compared to platform-specific functions and libraries

Who cares about "strict ANSI C"? The latest ISO C standard came out in 1999.

-C does not have Java's virtual machine features like garbage collection

C is perfectly capable of supporting garbage collection.

What innovation?? OpenVMS has had this for decades...

Recalling from memory the last hundred or so security patches released by MS for Windows 2000 in the last few years, I'd hazard that about 75% of the holes were buffer-overflow patches. That still leaves a lot of other vulnerabilities.

d) Only with permission

I've worked on Boehm's garbage collector at two employers, with their blessing. The changes I contributed back while at Roundpoint, are also usable in the code I'm working on at Business Web Software. A former colleague at Roundpoint also sent me some incomplete changes I made there that hadn't yet been contributed back. Since my managers had a clue about FLOSS, this reuse was all perfectly OK with them.

The problem is to know exactly which card will work... While a site like this can help you, it's very difficult to know right now what is supported by a specific distribution (For example, Mandrake says most WIFI card are supported, but their hardware compatibility is way out of date).

Most of the blame is on the distros side... They fails to provide proper information and they fail to support hardware that is widely used (even if a GPL driver exist).

The more CPU you have, the lazier the developers are in optimizing and the more the product managers want to add featuers. This is to be expected: why spend time optimizing an operation that takes 10msec that is only performed when a user presses a button? You could add a whistle intsead with that time.

As someone who has recently purchased a laptop after much searching, the trend appears to be towards portable desktops. People want laptops to use. Thus, they want to be able to do things like play FPS games on them. FPS games require high-end hardware. Some stores have gone to distinguishing "laptops" from "notebooks" to distinguish a 17" WXGA 9.3lb behemoths from a 12" 4.3lb laptop.

HP's "ultimate mobility" laptop weighs 6.5lb. To me, that is medium mobility. For "ultimate mobility", I want something under 5 pounds, such as Apple's Powerbook at 4.6 pounds or an Averetec 3150 at 4.3 pounds.

The hardware vendors seem to think that most people want power, not good mobility (more precisely, they think they can make more money there). If people do want power, than I suspect that notebooks will continue to push closer to desktops in terms of CPU speed.

Efficiency will not truly be viewed as a problem until Moore's law degrades to doubling every 4-5 years. Only then will software developers slow down on adding features and focus on optimality.

Also of note HP has licensed Apple's iPod, so add one more player to the market. (albeit a iPod clone as far as I can tell). HP will use iTunes so there will still only be one software player, but from what I can tell iTunes wipes the floor with WMP when it comes to managing and playing my music on both my Macs and my PCs.

You might want to do your own research before accusing others of not doing it.

I don't get it. Do you think Windows doesn't run on that class of hardware?

FYI: 100 ft from where I am sitting there is an "HP Orca" with 64 IA64 McKinley cpus, 1Tb memory, and 1Tb+ of disk running Win2k SP1. Here's a link.

I wonder if they will use an HP/Indigo DigitalPress. These things are monster offset printers that can do huge jobs, but are able to print a different image/source on each successive page.

They are really quite amazing.

Check them here: HP.com

your arguments are just as good as Microsoft's - that is, they aren't well formed

Then I appreciate your taking the time for the lesson, although my post wasn't intended to be an academic dissertation.

They don't have to be true to be facts. A fact simply exists irregardless of its validity to the real world.

define:fact

• a statement or assertion of verified information about something that is the case or has happened; "he supported his argument with an impressive array of facts"
• an event known to have happened or something known to have existed; "your fears have no basis in fact"; "how much of the story is fact and how much fiction is hard to tell"
• a concept whose truth can be proved; "scientific hypotheses are not facts"
• A statement or piece of information that is true or a real occurrence.

If the TCO is about $10.K +/- 20% then those prices aren't very significant by definition!

Statistically speaking, you are almost correct!

First of all, TCO is not $10K +/- 20%, it is $4.7K +/- 20% (Gartner: Desktop TCO Update 2003 , please ignore their conclusions re: TCO for WinXP/StarOffice and Linux for now). That would make 370-480 statistically significant at about 9%, assuming no software upgrades during the 3-year PC lifetime.

Second, I think it's hard to argue that an average savings of $425 per desktop is "not very significant." This is much easier to claim than to practice. Even using your worst-case TCO estimate, that's 3%. But this is not an academic exercise. All things being equal, there is not an intelligent person in the world who would not jump at an offer to save $370-480 per desktop. If you're a small business with 5 PC's, that's the price of a firewall. If you're an enterprise with 5,000 PC's, that's equivalent to 6 mid-level IT staff for three years, fully loaded.

Virtually the remainder of your post consists of insightful and "well formed" hypothesis. I cannot recall any circumstance where either MSO or OO.org broke third-party apps. Data testing is a push. Your theories on macro restrictions and the relationship between macro use and decades-long upgrade cycles are, well, fantastic.

Typical slashbot FUD.

Please explain how pocket, portable computing would have been possible even ten years ago. The hardware was the limiting factor. Microsoft had nothing to do with it - the state of the semiconductor industry did. We didn't have CPUs that worked withotu sucking *lots* of juice. NMOS CPUs were very power hungry.

Today we have calculators with 75 MHz processors, powered off AAA batteries. Would that have been possible 10 years ago? perhaps, but the price would have been insane.

Companies are always free to develop their own embedded OS; some do. Back then the hardware wasn't available. So quit the microsoft bashing.

Typical slashdot groupthink

Do these count?

These are the ones I used to use.

Lovely simple machine. The ALGOL compiler was really good.

"HP is now the first major technology vendor to offer enterprise customers a single, proven Linux solution from desktop to datacenter," said Martin Fink...

...across its portfolio of business desktop and notebook PCs...

Here is HP's news release. It is mostly marketing fluff, but has a few more details than the Reuter's piece. Their server also isn't melting down at the moment.

Selling Linux boxes is cool. But there are many other sources of cheaper Linux systems. HP should kindly understand that logic.

Can I observe I am one of those people who is (currently) paid to work on an OSS project, a distributed deployment framework called SmartFrog.

I am doing this as part of my day job as a Computing Researcher at HPLabs, an organisation which hasnt (yet) suffered the knife of death in it, but still has to deal with a slow death of many cuts.

Why are we doing OSS work? Because (a) we know we can get something back from the community (academic as well as pure OSS), (b) its what users expect, and (c) as we dont have a software business any more, how else can you ship it.

OSS makes a great platform for doing CS research; I know lots of people who use it. Take Jean "Linux WLAN" Tourhilles, or David Mossberger, one of the leads on the IA64 ports of Linux.

Its good for research as in closed source, MS have such a monopoly that you cannot innovate, and even if you get access to Win2K source, you cannot share your works with others. Research and OSS goes hand in hand, be it industrial or academic. Or personal: there is nothing to stop the reader doing innovative stuff at home, be it community WLAN frameworks, new thread scheduling algorithms or better XML parsers.

My school library offers similar service. last time i used it to suggest a book to buy ( Perl Cookbook 2 ) later in few weeks I was able to borrow it from the library. happy customer :)

live librarian chat lower left corner the link to talk to a live librarian

the most recent experience was talking to a HP technical person about printer through it's online chat service. To say the least it was helpful and solved my probelm.

HP instant support

I think a lot of companise ( IBM,Toshiba,Cisco if they haven't ) should set up similar service. It will definitly make their customer happier when they in need of service.

As do Solaris and HP-UX.

Yes, it would be good if large companies like:
IBM, Hewlett Packard, Sun, etc would become interested in open source wouldnt it?

You might be interested in reading the papers on Visual-C++dotnet. It (through wierd thingies similar to pointers but different) will be able to run under a VM. Since it has guys from the C++ standardization body architecting it (Herb Sutter, from the infamous gotw question that started this thread), it would be interesting to see how it evolves and if these extentions get brought back into the standard.

I think it's premature to say it'll never get in there.

Oh, and regarding garbage collection, C++ has that too, through Boehm's garbage collector that works with C and C++

IIRC, some older Compaq-machines had this sort of thing with their BIOS; once the disk went bad on these, that was it. Instant boat-anchor.

Not quite. Core BIOS functions were stored in ROM. The stuff that went on the HD was configuration & diagnostic software, not too different from the floppy you would've used to configure a PC/AT back in the day.

You used to be able to download this software from Compaq so you could install it on a new drive. If you still had access to the original drive, you could also have it back up its diagnostic software to floppy so you could install it on a new drive without having to download it. (Looks like the downloads are still available...have a look here, for instance. "Computer Setup/VP and PC Diagnostics" is the package you'd download and install to reload the setup software (in this case, for a Deskpro 2000).)

It's always good to see linux being adopted elsewhere but I worry about HP's commitment to helping the opensource community. It looks like they sponsor a few project here but thats seems like a far cry from IBM's investment in open source. So my question is this. Do you think HP is simply profiteering off the backs of generous open source developers or are they doing enough as is?

Slashrank

Is this not high end enough for you? Kidding aside, the biggest reason more workstations are sold with Linux is that there aren't enough professional applications (design stuff like ProE, The pSPICE family (at least Cadence and Synopsys, etc) haven't all been ported to linux yet. Most made it to Windows a few years back. Keep in mind that it took some time for the software to make it over to the Windows world, and that was for a 50%-75% cost savings. Moving from Windows to Linux doesn't bring the same one time cost savings, and workstation buyers aren't afraid to spend a signficant amount of cash if it means that their employees will be more productive by not retraining on new application software if a different version exists.

• Linux - Mandrake 9.2
• Intel(R) Pentium(R)2.80A GHz/533MHz
• 256MB DDR 400MHz (2X128)
• Integrated Intel(R) Extreme graphics2 (64MB equivalent)
• 40GB PATA/100 5400RPM
• 16X/40X DVD-ROM Linux and audio cable for Linux

They can't make them only sell Windows but...

HP recommends Microsoft(R) Windows(R) XP Professional.

HP SMB site

I read the press releases a while ago last year. I recall it being a "worldwide agreement". I dunno much else. the press release from HP is here. i searched for mandrake's too.

It says right on their site that they're using an HP branded version of iTunes. I'm not sure if this will extend to the Starbucks deal but it seems extremely likely. Why would they choose Apple, iTunes and the iPod and then offer a service that competes with that?