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Because Intel is a hardware company.
Hardware companies solve problems in hardware.
It just never occurred to them :)
HP on the other hand, who was co-designing the Itanium, wrote an emulator called Aries which emulated HP-PA by doing runtime translation, and that worked perfectly, and at about 80% of the normal app speed. Aries was shipped with HP-UX 11i on the orignal Itanium, and is greatly helping people transition from HP-PA machines to Itanium machines without recompiles, and no loss of performance (since Itaniums are usually faster than the PA's).
Apparently, after 10 years of hardware development of a crappy x86 emulator, Intel realized that its easier (and faster!) to do it in software.

What they still haven't done is implement something like this in hardware, but efficiently, like Transmeta does -- they translate x86 to a RISC core in hardware, and get really good performance.
But hey, this is Intel we're talking about :)

I would describe it as "they studied", not that "they feared".

When Apple conducted experiments in the late '70s or early '80s, multibutton mice were faster for experienced users, but increased the errors and confusion of inexperenced users. I'm not sure if studies done today would give similar results. The mouse is so commonplace that television comercials for Hewlett Packard use the hypercard's "index finger" mouse pointer to show selection, and children's cartoons like Dora the Explorer emulate the mouse selection metaphor.

Cisco has not only drivers for linux but also their config tools: cisco Aironet 350 linux drivers

Cisco Aironet 5 GHz 54 Mbps Wireless LAN Client Adapter 802.11a cards don't mention linux drivers on the data sheet, but hopefully they will soon.

If you're interested in linux and 802.11 stuff check out linux wlan project and wlan resources for linux

According to HP, Ximian GNOME for HP-UX was developed under a partnership with Ximian Inc.

I'm pretty sure that Ximian doesn't make alot of money by selling Ximian Desktop to end users (I bought it, but most people don't buy, they download for free). Many of Ximian's recent headlines talk about their deals with large companies like HP and Sun. Now that HP is dropping out, will Ximian lose some of the planned contracts?

I hope not. Ximian are some of the best contributors to the Gnome project.

http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2003/03012 3b.html

and

http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2002/02103 1a.html

----

HP is slowly rotting. We'll clearly see huge layoffs soon. Examples:

In a major bid for PCs recently (1000+ systems) they were 150+% of the lowest bid. So much for what one sales executive said in the press, "we will loose no bids because of price."

Shipping of I2 products started amazingly late.

The ever-diminishing quality of Scanjets. "Oh you mean that you used it a couple of hours a day? They aren't designed for that!", said the help desk. Funny, the old ones were. I'd like those designs updated and then leave the hell alone. And yes, sell parts for the damn things so when the bulb dies we just replace the bulb, not the whole scanner.

Even their own folks admit that the Laserjet 9000 mechanics are awful.

It all adds up to HP management not sticking to their core business, but instead messing around with mergers and other things they don't understand.

I have been hopeing that someone would purchase the corpse of HP calculators and return to the innovation that made them great. They'll have to restart the IR printers and the IO cards. They'll also have to reassemble the team that made the designs things one took months to grow into. Making HP calculators a success would be a delightful proof of concept that Carlie is a by the numbers, not by the ideas manager. HP was made by ideas, not numbers.

Soon Dell+Lexmark will have gotten the costs down, the quality up and the delivered cost per page halved. Then HP will not be able to live off the cash cow that printing and imaging currently is. Then there will be trouble in the core of the business that no amount of MBA money manipulation will be able to fix. Ideas still count in high tech, a thought lost on the HP front office.

Finally, I was very bumbed that Agilent didn't get to keep the HP name. The HP way is still alive over there. HP should have lost the right to have the name of two wonderful engineers in their name when they spun Agilent off. Talk about dumping the date that brought you to the dance!

HP will survive; they have too many bright people and a good portfolio of Intellectual Property. The path to survival is going to get really really ugly and there is little now that can be done to prevent that.

-- Multics

http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2003/03012 3b.html

and

http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2002/02103 1a.html

----

HP is slowly rotting. We'll clearly see huge layoffs soon. Examples:

In a major bid for PCs recently (1000+ systems) they were 150+% of the lowest bid. So much for what one sales executive said in the press, "we will loose no bids because of price."

Shipping of I2 products started amazingly late.

The ever-diminishing quality of Scanjets. "Oh you mean that you used it a couple of hours a day? They aren't designed for that!", said the help desk. Funny, the old ones were. I'd like those designs updated and then leave the hell alone. And yes, sell parts for the damn things so when the bulb dies we just replace the bulb, not the whole scanner.

Even their own folks admit that the Laserjet 9000 mechanics are awful.

It all adds up to HP management not sticking to their core business, but instead messing around with mergers and other things they don't understand.

I have been hopeing that someone would purchase the corpse of HP calculators and return to the innovation that made them great. They'll have to restart the IR printers and the IO cards. They'll also have to reassemble the team that made the designs things one took months to grow into. Making HP calculators a success would be a delightful proof of concept that Carlie is a by the numbers, not by the ideas manager. HP was made by ideas, not numbers.

Soon Dell+Lexmark will have gotten the costs down, the quality up and the delivered cost per page halved. Then HP will not be able to live off the cash cow that printing and imaging currently is. Then there will be trouble in the core of the business that no amount of MBA money manipulation will be able to fix. Ideas still count in high tech, a thought lost on the HP front office.

Finally, I was very bumbed that Agilent didn't get to keep the HP name. The HP way is still alive over there. HP should have lost the right to have the name of two wonderful engineers in their name when they spun Agilent off. Talk about dumping the date that brought you to the dance!

HP will survive; they have too many bright people and a good portfolio of Intellectual Property. The path to survival is going to get really really ugly and there is little now that can be done to prevent that.

-- Multics

Guess I'll have to put to use our lab DL760 G2 machine. Has 2.5 GB currently, should be able to find another 2.5 gb for it (Raid 5 memory overhead and all).

How well does BSD work with Hyperthreading? The lab box has 4 HT enabled Xeons in it right now, and I could toss in another 4, resulting in 16 virtual CPUs.

Open your eyes buddy, times are a changing...hot-swap PCI on "PC" servers has existed for years and works quite reliably.

PCI buses on "PC" servers are far superior to anything from Sun today, max bandwidth from Sun is only 66Mhz/64-bit, most PC servers offer multiple PCI-X buses - 100Mhz/64-bit that are almost twice as fast. Proliant DL760

You can hot-swap memory on "PC" servers for the last year and a half IBM x440 with ChipKill (AKA Raid 1 Memory)...better than anyone else out there.

And scaleability goes to 32-way for 32-bit ES7000and 64-way for Intel Itanium Altix 3000

As for hot swapping CPUs...god luck on a Sun server, technically you could make it work...practically it's useless today. You have to stop your apps (that's great for HA isn't it?) shrink your domain (if it's bigger then 4 CPUs) isolate the faulty CPU, swap it, resize the domain...then (this is the critical part) restart all you apps so that they recognize the newly added CPU and memory...again technically it works, practically speaking just because the OS is still alive doesn't really matter...no 3rd party apps can cope with this fudging with their memory and CPUs...

The only systems out there that can truly cope with this type of activity are mainframes and Tandem / NonStop solutions...

"The HP LaserJet printer experiences increasing multiple feeds toward the end of warranty or service life. The separation pad installer provides a one-time solution to the issue of multi-feeds and paper jams caused by the hardening of the old pad."

check out this and order the neat fix-tool.
yeah, its free.. good to see some responsability taken!

"Now there's alot of people saying "use a palmpilot" but they don't know what they're talking about. The palmpilot and the like's IR transmitter simply isn't powerful enough to work as remote control. Think about it. If it says it can send files from up to a meter away, what makes you think that it's going to be able to control your television at 4 meters?"

the new Ipaq's (not just the 5450 but some 3900 series, and i believe a 3800 series too) have consumer grade IR, and come with Nevo from universal electronics, They work Really well, but you are also giving up your PDA to use as a remote

Ive been looking for a remote just like the high end pronto

Color
Cheaper
Programmable by that I mean I can move everything around to my liking, not just a learning remote.
Easy for those in my household that arent to tech savvy to be able to use without being overwhelmed

The last three being the most important. ya ya i know choose 2, but there are oodles of the choose 2 variety that just dont cut it

Does anyone know of any roll yer own solutions?

I have tried the sony and it worked but it was choose 2 (cheaper, and easy to use), and I used my Ipaq 5450, but while having 3 of the 4 qualifications (programmable, easy to use and color) I found that since it is also my PDA the others in my house didnt like the fact that I had the remote with me all the time.

Any suggestions

Read about how to get a free new separation pad here.

Or order one directly here.

Read about how to get a free new separation pad here.

Or order one directly here.

You are not alone for the paper feed problem. There was a class-action suit against HP because of this. As part of the settlement, HP provides a owner-installed kit to fix the problem free of charge. See this link. I installed it and it did fix the problem.

Actually, if you own a Laserjet 5L, 6L, 3100, 3150,or 1100, and it developed paper feed jam, you could order those 'rubber' fix from HP free of charge (no shipping charge as well). See this link. The only catch is you have to read the instructions and install the fix yourself. I ordered and installed the fix for my LJ 6L. It did fix the problem (most of the time). However, you only have one chance to install it right. If you screw it up, you really need a HP technician to undo the damage. This freebie is the result of the class action of the unsatisfied owners the aforementioned printers.

Evil Slashdot lamefilter? ;-)

Here, in html tested and works.

It was essentially a network problem, but there's a good link in there for older printer manuals.

And I *really* have to get some sleep ;-) but I'll follow up in 6 hours or so if I manage to drag myself out of bed that quickly ;-)

SB

The Separation Pad Kit is free of charge and is covered by a Service Note until July 2003.

Officemax has the HP Laserjet 1200 as an end-of-life product that's selling for $199. If they're out, just go to or order from Staples. They'll price match it for you plus give you 10% of the difference which would make it $179. Just got one myself. Not a bad price at all. It's end-of-life because it's being replaced by the Laserjet 1300. And the cartridges aren't too bad either.

It's got PostScript Level 2 emulation and 45 scalable fonts plus 35 PostScript fonts built-in. Should be fine.

Officemax has the HP Laserjet 1200 as an end-of-life product that's selling for $199. If they're out, just go to or order from Staples. They'll price match it for you plus give you 10% of the difference which would make it $179. Just got one myself. Not a bad price at all. It's end-of-life because it's being replaced by the Laserjet 1300. And the cartridges aren't too bad either.

It's got PostScript Level 2 emulation and 45 scalable fonts plus 35 PostScript fonts built-in. Should be fine.

My HP 722c has been going strong for ~4 years now. So long as I can keep finding new ink for it, I can't see getting rid of it.

I do like the gadget factor of the newer models that can print photos right off of a memory stick, though.

Oh, you did know that, right? You can download ELILO straight off Intel's EFI section. (An observant reader will notice that it's actually hosted by HP's research lab, although I can't actually find the info there.)

Of course, you can also read about EFI and Linux from RedHat.

I wouldn't worry, somehow. Plus EFI is mostly used with the new Itanium architecture. I'm sure Linux will be able to survive the impending DRM apocolypse.

I agree with the OP that the x86 architecture is probably limited by it's high degree of backward compatibility. I don't have technical facts to back this up, but I think common-sense would agree with me here.

Well, yes and no. How about I quote an article that vaguely touches on the matter? Here's a random article that came up when I searched for "microinstructions x86". It somewhat explains the issues (though the author doesn't seem to understand that floating point registers, MMX registers, and SSE registers are all general purpose registers for most purposes).

Ah, but my point. The x86 is natively CISC (Complex Instruciton Set Computer) which means instructions have variable length and variable arguments. (Of course, SSE and MMX are both SIMD and have instructions varrying from 2 to 5 bytes long, so they're working against the whole RISC idea, but they've got their own special units.) Meanwhile, the SPARC is RISC based. In short, it's easier to make a RISC processor run faster. But that might not matter so much.

x86 implementation of the present day is essentially a RISC processor on the back end. The native CISC instructions are transformed into micro-instructions. This transformation is done in a decoder. So long as that transformation can be done quickly and the micro-instructions well pipelined, the decoder unit shouldn't be too much of a killer.

Having said that, it's worth mentioning some of the strange things that the decoder has to dedicate silicon to. Some trouble instructions are problematic in more than one way, as noted previously with plex86, PUSHF which pushes the current CPU flags (e.g. interrupt flag (enabled/disabled), zero flag (last comparison equal/last sub result in a zero)) onto the stack is problematic. Then there are others which are just a bad idea. PUSHA is an old instruction which pushes all of the 386 general purpose registers on to the stack (including (E)SP, even though it's ignored when POPA is called). These instructions are those sort of useless instructions which came from the philosophy that computers should, on the lower level, start to emulate the higher level languages they're normally programmed in. That idea didn't pan out, especially as RISC became clearly superior. Another similar strangeness is found in XLATB which I haven't seen used in my natural life by a human nor a compiler, but is still supported in modern CPUs. That's not even to get into BCD instructions...

As it stands, though, last I checked what most hurt computer performance in real situations are cache misses and branch mispredictions. I have seen HP make a processor that was completely backwards incompatible that solved this problem. That is, it forced you to recompile all of your old code. It packed instructions around every branch which indicated the full length of both paths. Then both paths could be evaluated at a low cost, and the results of the untaken path thrown away. Other similar things were done to increase the success of cache prefetch and whatnot. Server only, of course -- no one wants a non-backwards compatible processor on their desktop.

But, back to the article which is about new instructions which will improve some processing intensive applications. However, the article notes, problems with branch misprediction are not solved in the new Intel chip. The processor will be clocked faster (and hence, so will the cache) so the problem may be a bit less noticable.

But therein is the

I am not answering you in the thread where I read your post, because I'm moderating that thread. So, go buy a new Alpha here

The company has government contracts that say it must produce the alpha untill 2006. It is alive and well. In fact it is 10% faster than HP's Itanium offering, the superdome line of servers.

Since HP's intent is to comply with the government contract but not reduce sales of their high margin, larger investment and similar contract with intel Itanium systems, they are not advertising it, posting benchmarks or supporting it (theoreticly they are supporting the hardware mut their support for TRU-64 is minnimal at best).

Prices of the 8 processors at 1224 mhz w/256 GB of ram start at 1/4 million dollars. The DS20E is a desktop workstation running dual 833mhz EV 68 processors.

The 8p version will finish a seti@home work unit every 4 minutes.

If you have the cash, enjoy the power.

I also don't see much of the devlopment phase for this. Aren't real time Satellite images already availible? Isn't an iPaq strong enough to decode/decipher/function for this purpose? And aren't the Olympus EyeTrek Glassessmall enough for such a purpose?

I think the DEC had the potential to be a really great product. Seems like it got lost somewhere in the merger... plus, when it was released a couple of years ago it was priced way out of the market. Damn shame.

> I bought my HP laserjet for $240. About the $289 dollar inkjet from Dell. Inkhet printers are typically $200-$100.

I would say about $150 for a decent one. You're not going to print photos with your laser (something a lot of consumers look for in a printer). Also, most consumer balk at the cost of toner compared to ink cartidges.

> After switching to laser I will never go back. I do not need color for most documents and the quality and reliablity are so much better.

I prefer laser prints, too, but I bet you can find some near-laser quality inkjets at your local superstore.

> My epson inkjet blows goatballs and always jams.

If you buy a shitty printer, you get shitty results. There are good inkjets out there, although each varies greatly depending on your needs. Mostly photos? Epson 825 or 925. Mostly documents? Get a Samsung laser for home or decent HP laser for office. Mostly color documents? I would go with the HP 7150 at home or the 6122 in the office.

The Epson 825 has stunning color photo prints and has a 5-color print built in. I don't think the cartridges are that bad either, unless you do a lot of color document printing (instead of photos), the you'll burn through the 3-color fast and waste the photo cyan and magenta. However, if you're doing a lot of color documents, go with a printer with separate photo ink tanks. Get a 825 or 925 if you're serious about photos.

> I bought my HP laserjet for $240. About the $289 dollar inkjet from Dell. Inkhet printers are typically $200-$100.

I would say about $150 for a decent one. You're not going to print photos with your laser (something a lot of consumers look for in a printer). Also, most consumer balk at the cost of toner compared to ink cartidges.

> After switching to laser I will never go back. I do not need color for most documents and the quality and reliablity are so much better.

I prefer laser prints, too, but I bet you can find some near-laser quality inkjets at your local superstore.

> My epson inkjet blows goatballs and always jams.

If you buy a shitty printer, you get shitty results. There are good inkjets out there, although each varies greatly depending on your needs. Mostly photos? Epson 825 or 925. Mostly documents? Get a Samsung laser for home or decent HP laser for office. Mostly color documents? I would go with the HP 7150 at home or the 6122 in the office.

The Epson 825 has stunning color photo prints and has a 5-color print built in. I don't think the cartridges are that bad either, unless you do a lot of color document printing (instead of photos), the you'll burn through the 3-color fast and waste the photo cyan and magenta. However, if you're doing a lot of color documents, go with a printer with separate photo ink tanks. Get a 825 or 925 if you're serious about photos.

> I bought my HP laserjet for $240. About the $289 dollar inkjet from Dell. Inkhet printers are typically $200-$100.

I would say about $150 for a decent one. You're not going to print photos with your laser (something a lot of consumers look for in a printer). Also, most consumer balk at the cost of toner compared to ink cartidges.

> After switching to laser I will never go back. I do not need color for most documents and the quality and reliablity are so much better.

I prefer laser prints, too, but I bet you can find some near-laser quality inkjets at your local superstore.

> My epson inkjet blows goatballs and always jams.

If you buy a shitty printer, you get shitty results. There are good inkjets out there, although each varies greatly depending on your needs. Mostly photos? Epson 825 or 925. Mostly documents? Get a Samsung laser for home or decent HP laser for office. Mostly color documents? I would go with the HP 7150 at home or the 6122 in the office.

The Epson 825 has stunning color photo prints and has a 5-color print built in. I don't think the cartridges are that bad either, unless you do a lot of color document printing (instead of photos), the you'll burn through the 3-color fast and waste the photo cyan and magenta. However, if you're doing a lot of color documents, go with a printer with separate photo ink tanks. Get a 825 or 925 if you're serious about photos.

Its ALL about the Ben Franklins.

And as for MPE being unintuitive, well, all a matter of perception. I find :HELLO, :BYE, and :LISTFILE much more intuitive than their *nix counterparts. Maybe not as efficient for typing, but hey, that's what UDCs are for. ;->

if a mainstream product ... started using the Itanium


Although I'm sure that Intel wants all the customers it can get, it already has a mainstream product: Ever hear of Hewlett-Packard or Windows XP?

I've used templates fairly extensively, and have *never* seen any use of allocators other than the default.

They can come in handy when you're trying to use STL (er, C++ Standard Library) containers with, say, garbage collection.

According to this page, two laptop models are available with RedHat 7.1 or SuSe 7.2.

I work at hp. I have just this minute returned from helping smoke test a RedHat AS install on a quad Itanium 2, 40GB machine that's going to a large government customer. It's one of several dozen.

These people would just never cope with buying random hardware and downloading Linux onto it. Their mind doesn't work that way, regardless of the quality of the software. Buying from hp gives them assurance and support.

I just wish they'd give me one on long-term loan. :-) It's a sexy beast, even if it sounds like a hairdryer. Fat chance though.

What's even better is when you do go to the HP Linux link they give you, it talks about how they chose Red Hat -- nothing about Debian :)

This Slashdot user('s IT) is using HP Omniback and was happy to do it more than once.

hp has a Digital Media Reciever that sits on a wifi network and scans the network for shared folders with music, AND pictures. Then, it plugs into a stereo/tv using s-video and rca cables. It seems to me that this whole phillips stereo is just another version of the same things you can already do with a computer and the hp DMR.

For the record, I do acknowledge that the DMR is SERIOUSLY lacking in that it can't do video. When they support DivX, I'm all for it.

hp has a Digital Media Reciever that sits on a wifi network and scans the network for shared folders with music, AND pictures. Then, it plugs into a stereo/tv using s-video and rca cables. It seems to me that this whole phillips stereo is just another version of the same things you can already do with a computer and the hp DMR.

For the record, I do acknowledge that the DMR is SERIOUSLY lacking in that it can't do video. When they support DivX, I'm all for it.

HP Shopping

processor Mobile AMD Athlon(TM) XP Processor 2000+ (1.67GHz) with PowerNow!(TM) Technology
memory 512MB DDR SDRAM (2x256MB) at 266MHz; maximum 1024MB DDR SDRAM (2x512MB)
hard drive 60GB enhanced-IDE [gigabyte is defined as 1,000,000,000 bytes, accessible capacity may vary]
multimedia drive DVD+CD-RW Combo (CD-read 24x; CD-write 8x; CD-rewrite 8x; DVD-read 8x)
display 15.0" XGA TFT (1024 x 768)
communications Integrated v.90/v.92 56K modem (RJ-11 connector)
video ATI MOBILITY RADEON(TM) AGP 4X and 3D architecture
sound 16-bit Sound Blaster Pro-compatible audio; internal stereo speakers
weight 7.25 lbs (weight may vary due to vendor component changes)
dimensions 12.96" (L) x 10.72" (W) x 1.57" (H)
operating system Microsoft® Windows® XP Home Edition

Hopfully there's no session cookie.

There are a variety of agents and monitoring tools that make up the Insight Management toolset. We've found that some of the tools are better than others.

Pretty much the only *essential* tool that's required is the cpqhealth drivers and daemons. This poll the health of the onboard systems such as fans, CPUs, disk arrays, etc, and will log to syslog when there is a fault. Unforunately, the open source lm_sensors and cpqarrayd packages don't talk to the hardware in the new G3 DL380's, so cpqhealth is your only option. You can find it on HP's support site, as part of the hpasm package for Linux... I grabbed my copy for RedHat 7.3 from here.

cpqhealth comes with pre-built modules for RedHat 7.3, 8.0 and a few other distros (SuSE for example). But I've found that even the most up to date stuff from HP's site only supports the kernels shipped on the RedHat cd, and nothing newer. Luckily, cpqhealth (part of the hpasm package) does allow you to build new modules. You'll need a compiler on the machine. Take a peek at this script: /opt/compaq/cpqhealth/custom_cpqhealth.sh - it will build a new cpqhealth RPM for you, containing the drivers and daemons necessary to log hardware faults to the syslog (as well as to take action on them).

The script will break when you first run it - it will look for the following two files:

/opt/compaq/cpqhealth/cpqasm/S10cpqasm
/opt/compaq/cpqhealth/hpuid

Both of which are missing in the most recent hpasm release. Create the S10cpqasm file yourself (it's just a startup script that gets dumped /etc/init.d - a simple touch of that file is fine for now - you can put a proper one together later), and copy hpuid from /bin (where it gets installed when you installed the hpasm RPM).

Once done, you'll have an RPM that installs the following:

two kernel modules: cpqasm.o, cpqevt.o

two daemons: /opt/compaq/cpqhealth/cpqasm/casmd
/opt/compaq/cpqhealth/cpqevt/cevtd

Make sure the kernel modules and daemons get loaded, and you'll now get warnings when a fan fails, disk in the RAID array dies, etc.

Even better - unlike the rest of the HP/Compaq Insight stuff, this doesn't use SNMP, doesn't install a web server that listens to 0.0.0.0, and seems to work quite well.

Other annoying things I've discovered about the rest of the HP/Compaq toolset:

• Dumb OS-detection routines - the Storage Monitor Agent greps /etc/issue for "RedHat" + "7.3"...
• Over-reliance on SNMP.
• Unclear documentation - the agents indicate they'll work with the snmpd shipped with RedHat, whereas HPs site indicates you need to install the HP-modded snmpd.
• Corporate schizophrenia - some daemons called hpxxxx, others called cpqxxxx ... some scripts fail, looking for the old filename (HP renamed Compaq daemons, forgot to update script).
• Check ports 2301 and 2381 - One or more of the agents installs webservers there, for "remote management". They listen to 0.0.0.0 and have no IP-filtering ability. So make sure that it's firewalled off. netstat -anp is your friend.

In the end, we just ended up installing cpqhealth on the boxes to warn us of hardware problems, and will use RRDtool for our other monitoring requirements.

Sounds to me like someone decided to save a bit of money by not buying the Online JFS package.

It's under $2k per CPU - not bad when you look at the price of the hardware.

Of course if you have online JFS you probably also want mirrordisk/ux which is another $1k per CPU.

But, if you are using Service Guard, you already have both of these, and probably went for the Mission Critical Operating Enviroment package that has all of the optional packages (online JFS, mirrordisk, service guard, EMS, glance+, etc..) bundled with it for a mere $10k per CPU.

If you're spending a million+ on hardware for one server, a couple of hundred thousand for the OS is not that much more.

Sounds to me like someone decided to save a bit of money by not buying the Online JFS package.

It's under $2k per CPU - not bad when you look at the price of the hardware.

Of course if you have online JFS you probably also want mirrordisk/ux which is another $1k per CPU.

But, if you are using Service Guard, you already have both of these, and probably went for the Mission Critical Operating Enviroment package that has all of the optional packages (online JFS, mirrordisk, service guard, EMS, glance+, etc..) bundled with it for a mere $10k per CPU.

If you're spending a million+ on hardware for one server, a couple of hundred thousand for the OS is not that much more.

Sounds to me like someone decided to save a bit of money by not buying the Online JFS package.

It's under $2k per CPU - not bad when you look at the price of the hardware.

Of course if you have online JFS you probably also want mirrordisk/ux which is another $1k per CPU.

But, if you are using Service Guard, you already have both of these, and probably went for the Mission Critical Operating Enviroment package that has all of the optional packages (online JFS, mirrordisk, service guard, EMS, glance+, etc..) bundled with it for a mere $10k per CPU.

If you're spending a million+ on hardware for one server, a couple of hundred thousand for the OS is not that much more.

I'd love to see a Single System Image cluster like TruCluster and a good clustering file system to support it. There is work in progress, but there is alot left to make it shine like TruCluster.

Ohh, it would be great if evms supported OpenGFS.

DH Brown has a _very good_ report about 2002 UNIX function review report.

No debate on the merits of commercial UNIX vs. Linux would be complete however if someone doesn't mention the kick-ass software RAID driver "md" that Linux has. Does any other UNIX have software raid that is this complete? I would certainly consider this a "high-end" feature.

Uh, I know this isn't your main point, but the HP Tablet PC *is* a Transmeta-based system, specifically a Crusoe 5800.

i manage around a hundred remote compaq servers, and every single one of them has a remote insight board installed. it gives you remote key/mouse/video through any java enabled browser. it has it's own network interface and power supply, so it works even when the host system is powered off or completely broken. you wouldn't want to play quake through the thing, but slapping one of these in your boxes means you'll probably never have to physically touch that system again except for hardware replacements.

Finally and most importantly, run ZoneAlarm. This makes it extremely easy to stop hidden windows components from phoning home, and you might just be surprised when you find out what else it's stopping. For example, my HP keyboard driver was trying to contact HP for god-knows-what-reason.