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is what I have, the specs are here.

For having a 1Ghz (700Mhz with SpeedStep), 30Gb HDD. 15" SXGA screen running at 1400 x 1050 I still manage to get almost 4 hours out of 1 battery. Add the other in and I can get over 7 hours. Mine may be a tad pricey, as I got every single feature out there, but it starts at around 1100$. Check it out

I work for Sun in the Cobalt Server Appliances group. I personally run StarOffice on my RH7.1 laptop for doing presentations for customers, etc. It is not _mandatory_ for Sun employees to use StarOffice, but most do. It's the only suite that Sun's internal IT group supports. So people who choose M$ Office are on their own for support. Also, Netscape is Sun's "official" browser and email program. If you read your mail with Outlook, etc, you're on your own too...

Apple's Website and General Feedback page is at: http://www.apple.com/contact/feedback.html and you can email HP's CEO here: http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/execteam/email/fiorina/in dex.htm

A small feature which would be greatly appreciated is the functionality of the xmms-crossfade plugin.

I recon this sounds more interestings. More info also here in a good New Scientist article that also conducted an experiment like the Turing test, but with an audience of clubbers listening to the artificial DJ.

Unfortunately I think the HP has the patents on these algorithms, but I guess it maybe possible to licence...

Yeah, but afaik, akamai doesn't cache the actual html pages, just flash, images, videos, and so forth. Kinda difficult for those to be useful when no one can get CNN's index.html file, eh?

As for CNN on Sept 11th, they never delivered their HTML base page via a CDN which would have made for seemless handling of the traffic. But instead they solved the immediate congestion problem (after 3 hours and 40 minutes) by creating a single stripped down static page that used fewer resources for the site. Here is a timeline of the www.cnn.com home page as seen by our Site Analyser service.

1. 08:50 EDT - Base page errors started occuring, presumably due to lots of requests generating a too high load on CNN's servers. This resulted in end users not being able to see any of the site's content.
   
2. 12:00 to 13:30 - Base page errors fluctuate with embbeded content errors and a few seconds of DNS response time to 205.188.214.121 which nslookup calls tswebsys2.ptn.aol.com
   
3. 13:30 - Successfull, sub-second delivery of a stripped down 2915 byte index.html page from www.cnn.com with only single 14144 byte image from akamai.net.

I don't know why you would want to pay $650 when you can buy a very good laptop for little more.

Two words: INSTANT BOOT. My laptop takes 3-4 minutes to boot. I cannot tell you how many times I have been just standing around when a great idea hits me. I itch for a Pocket PC because then I could just take the Pocket PC out, use the voice recorder to record my ideas, and stick it back in my pocket.

I really want a Jornada 720, which has the keyboard as well, so I can do spreadsheets. It also takes the IBM Microdrive 1GB so I can carry all my MP3s around. Plus, it's smaller than my laptop, so I wouldn't have to carry around a separate bag...

HP's Superdome actually compares quite well in the "high-end Unix" realm. Dig it: Superdome.

Linux needs one major manufacturer to produce and market a Linux Consumer PC.

The company is called Hewlett Packard. They ship a number of workstations with Mandrake 8.0 preinstalled, and even have fire-and-forget CDs for wiping some of their boxes and installing a fresh Mandrake 8.0 system with no user intervention.

I'm just installing the HP secure linux product now. Here.

In light of the HP/Compaq merger, it seems likely that at least one of these products will either never see the light of day or will be killed in short order. (I vote for croaking the iPaq.)

I really hate to say it, but I am not optimistic about Visor's chances of turning a profit anytime soon. Cheaper knockoffs are starting to chip away at their customer base, and much wealthier companies are taking over the high end with their CE devices.

-sting3r

More info in HP's Linux/Java platform can be found here, and here.

It goes some way to addressing the doubts of cynics (like me) about the real-world usefulness of Java for anything other than a CS-graduate-existence-justification tool.

HP ever since has been shouting at the top of its voice that there will be complete binary compatibility between PA-RISC and IA-64 using technology such as Aries. They have to in order to retain any customers. Binary compatibility is simply non-negotiable.

Thus HP gave away its two crown jewels, processor architecture and compiler technology, to Intel for precisely one reason--binary compatibility with what was perceived to be the potential industry-standard processor of the future. It would be to say the least rather strange for HP to walk away from this to embrace either Linux or Tru64. To do this would be to admit that HP gave away its crown jewels to Intel for nothing. (Which is actually the case since anyone from IBM to Dell etc. will be allowed to be resellers for IA-64.)

My question for those who would have HP abandon HU-UX--what's left? What exactly would HP have left as crown jewels that would distinguish its Unix offerings from the competition?

I've said this before, it was the decision to not fab the next generation of PA-RISC that decided everything for HP and nothing else. Once HP surrendered any hope of competing against Intel there was nowhere to go for increasing higher margin sales. Who exactly was going to embrace HP's future offerings when more than five years ago it was common knowledge they were transitioning to a new processor fabbed by Intel? That was the reason HP had no answer to Sun during the boom of the 1990s. Instead HP was stuck with trying to sell NT workstations and then a completely desperate move to go into selling home PCs in a bid to raise cash by any means possible. Sun on the other hand, relatively free from having to worry about what either Intel or Microsoft thought, was able to create a software business from scratch with Java. By keeping control of Java, Sun was able to leverage IBM into helping it storm into corporate business software. And all this could be done without sacrificing Solaris for Linux or any other such preposterous nonsolution.

I think HP's executives simply made a series of shocking miscalculations. In this analysis there is only mention of X86 and Power PC. There is nothing said about Sun which doesn't fab their own chips, they have instead a 13+ year partnership with Texas Instruments. Last I saw Texas Instruments' market cap was larger than either HP or Compaq, considered separately. I think it was also a miscalculation that Intel would be the only place to go for a foundry, what about IBM? (I have to wonder with the Asian nations pouring so many resources into semiconductors whether we aren't entering a rather long period of plenty of surplus manufacturing capacity. The only obstacle I see is the US government's intervention in not wanting to potentially see technology shipped abroad. At least this applies to China which the US wants to keep one or two generations behind in wafer fabrication technology.)

Lastly for those who want HP to standardize on Linux...uh, standardize on what? What exactly do you think will be the winner in say filesystems? ReiserFS, Ext3, JFS, XFS? And at least three of of those four alternatives are technology controlled by other companies. How about KDE vs. Gnome, RPM vs other packaging alternatives, PostgreSQL vs MySQL? Notice that IBM has good in-house solutions they will offer for many of these basic questions, what does HP have? I think it's going to be a hard sell to argue that the complexity of HP-UX will be easier than having to potentially support all of these alternatives.

I just find it shocking that a company the size of HP/Compaq will not think it can find the funds to either fab its own chips or pay someone other than Intel to do so. At that size IBM is able to do everything from hardware to software as well as fund a massive R&D patent-producing machine. Wny is it so hard to understand that in a world where IP is king, you better own your own stuff?

HP ever since has been shouting at the top of its voice that there will be complete binary compatibility between PA-RISC and IA-64 using technology such as Aries. They have to in order to retain any customers. Binary compatibility is simply non-negotiable.

Thus HP gave away its two crown jewels, processor architecture and compiler technology, to Intel for precisely one reason--binary compatibility with what was perceived to be the potential industry-standard processor of the future. It would be to say the least rather strange for HP to walk away from this to embrace either Linux or Tru64. To do this would be to admit that HP gave away its crown jewels to Intel for nothing. (Which is actually the case since anyone from IBM to Dell etc. will be allowed to be resellers for IA-64.)

My question for those who would have HP abandon HU-UX--what's left? What exactly would HP have left as crown jewels that would distinguish its Unix offerings from the competition?

I've said this before, it was the decision to not fab the next generation of PA-RISC that decided everything for HP and nothing else. Once HP surrendered any hope of competing against Intel there was nowhere to go for increasing higher margin sales. Who exactly was going to embrace HP's future offerings when more than five years ago it was common knowledge they were transitioning to a new processor fabbed by Intel? That was the reason HP had no answer to Sun during the boom of the 1990s. Instead HP was stuck with trying to sell NT workstations and then a completely desperate move to go into selling home PCs in a bid to raise cash by any means possible. Sun on the other hand, relatively free from having to worry about what either Intel or Microsoft thought, was able to create a software business from scratch with Java. By keeping control of Java, Sun was able to leverage IBM into helping it storm into corporate business software. And all this could be done without sacrificing Solaris for Linux or any other such preposterous nonsolution.

I think HP's executives simply made a series of shocking miscalculations. In this analysis there is only mention of X86 and Power PC. There is nothing said about Sun which doesn't fab their own chips, they have instead a 13+ year partnership with Texas Instruments. Last I saw Texas Instruments' market cap was larger than either HP or Compaq, considered separately. I think it was also a miscalculation that Intel would be the only place to go for a foundry, what about IBM? (I have to wonder with the Asian nations pouring so many resources into semiconductors whether we aren't entering a rather long period of plenty of surplus manufacturing capacity. The only obstacle I see is the US government's intervention in not wanting to potentially see technology shipped abroad. At least this applies to China which the US wants to keep one or two generations behind in wafer fabrication technology.)

Lastly for those who want HP to standardize on Linux...uh, standardize on what? What exactly do you think will be the winner in say filesystems? ReiserFS, Ext3, JFS, XFS? And at least three of of those four alternatives are technology controlled by other companies. How about KDE vs. Gnome, RPM vs other packaging alternatives, PostgreSQL vs MySQL? Notice that IBM has good in-house solutions they will offer for many of these basic questions, what does HP have? I think it's going to be a hard sell to argue that the complexity of HP-UX will be easier than having to potentially support all of these alternatives.

I just find it shocking that a company the size of HP/Compaq will not think it can find the funds to either fab its own chips or pay someone other than Intel to do so. At that size IBM is able to do everything from hardware to software as well as fund a massive R&D patent-producing machine. Wny is it so hard to understand that in a world where IP is king, you better own your own stuff?

Actually, it would seem it's the other way around.

I was just browsing through a new HP-UX 11i guide, looking at info about CIFS/9000 which is based in large part on Samba. Since it's based on open-source software CIFS/9000 is free to download, but note that it only runs on HP-UX 11.x.

And that seems to be a good system for them: Develop tools based off the work of open-source projects (so the ground work is already done for you), but tailor them to only run on HP-UX. That way re-releasing the new tools for free doesn't hurt you, because the only way for someone to use them is if they are a paying HP-UX customer.

They've got the best of both worlds. The grunt work and benifits of open-source developers, AND they get to keep charging huge ammounts of money for the OS.

Actually, it would seem it's the other way around.

I was just browsing through a new HP-UX 11i guide, looking at info about CIFS/9000 which is based in large part on Samba. Since it's based on open-source software CIFS/9000 is free to download, but note that it only runs on HP-UX 11.x.

And that seems to be a good system for them: Develop tools based off the work of open-source projects (so the ground work is already done for you), but tailor them to only run on HP-UX. That way re-releasing the new tools for free doesn't hurt you, because the only way for someone to use them is if they are a paying HP-UX customer.

They've got the best of both worlds. The grunt work and benifits of open-source developers, AND they get to keep charging huge ammounts of money for the OS.

Huh?

Comapq's Linux effort.

HP's Linux effort.

I'm not saying that they have invested as much time or money into Linux as IBM, but don't say it has been overlooked by HPaq. Compaq even has links on their site for Linux on the iPaq handhelds.

Compaq Press Release
HP Press Release

The register, including a letter from Compaq Chairman & CEO - Michael D. Capellas
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/7/21444.html

The new york times story
http://archives.nytimes.com/2001/09/04/business/04 DEAL.html

The press release from Compaq
http://www.compaq.com/newsroom/pr/2001/pr200109040 2.html

The press release from HP
http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/04sep01a.h tm

The deals not done yet, mergers and monopolies dicussed at siliconvalley.com
http://www.siliconvalley.com/docs/opinion/techtest /ml090401.htm

MSNBC
http://www.msnbc.com/news/623619.asp

Wonder what Bruce Perens comments on all this are, come on speak up Bruce! Is this good for Linux?

--
Modrators: i may be karma whoring but that is no reason to moderate this below Score:1. Mod up not down! If only i had meta mod ...

The woman is damned smart. Personally, I would have to rank her as the most intelligent, dedicated, and insightful executive in Silicon Valley. A merger of this size will take many long nights, over many years, to fully become a reality. And I think Carly Fiorina has the dedication, knowledge, and experience to do it.

Think about it. She did wonders at Lucent.

I think what is most important, what differentiates her from the other executives in the industry, is what she knows about this industry.

"Virtually all meaningful advancements in business, society, and life are not achieved through the boldy acts of a few, but the everyday acts of many."

Cut through the marketing fluff of that quote she made last year. And you see that she really does have a clue of what runs a company. What runs the whole industry. Truly, what has, and always will run this world.

Her degree is, if I remember correctly, not in information technology or business... But actually in medieval studies. What do we learn by studying history? The mistakes people have made, and hopefully we learn to not make them again.

She's a smart business person. She sees the mistakes Compaq has made with Digital and Tandem. She knows to not make those same mistakes again. And she knows that her job depends on not making any mistakes. The hp Board is patient, but they're not going to sit around for a decade, while she's pushing her sixties still trying to get hp back on track. Carly has a year at the most to prove that she can head this megaconglomerate. She knows how to streamline (see latest quarterly report).

If she can pull this off, I would have to credit her as the most successful executive in history. If not, she can move on over to Nevada and take up stripping.

Which do you think she's planning on, and working towards?

jrbd

The woman is damned smart. Personally, I would have to rank her as the most intelligent, dedicated, and insightful executive in Silicon Valley. A merger of this size will take many long nights, over many years, to fully become a reality. And I think Carly Fiorina has the dedication, knowledge, and experience to do it.

Think about it. She did wonders at Lucent.

I think what is most important, what differentiates her from the other executives in the industry, is what she knows about this industry.

"Virtually all meaningful advancements in business, society, and life are not achieved through the boldy acts of a few, but the everyday acts of many."

Cut through the marketing fluff of that quote she made last year. And you see that she really does have a clue of what runs a company. What runs the whole industry. Truly, what has, and always will run this world.

Her degree is, if I remember correctly, not in information technology or business... But actually in medieval studies. What do we learn by studying history? The mistakes people have made, and hopefully we learn to not make them again.

She's a smart business person. She sees the mistakes Compaq has made with Digital and Tandem. She knows to not make those same mistakes again. And she knows that her job depends on not making any mistakes. The hp Board is patient, but they're not going to sit around for a decade, while she's pushing her sixties still trying to get hp back on track. Carly has a year at the most to prove that she can head this megaconglomerate. She knows how to streamline (see latest quarterly report).

If she can pull this off, I would have to credit her as the most successful executive in history. If not, she can move on over to Nevada and take up stripping.

Which do you think she's planning on, and working towards?

jrbd

look at the official press release

Look at this: Linux Evangelist

And there's a nice picture of Tux on HP's webpage.

F-bacher

Brought to us by the same people that told us the big pipeline would solve all our problems and that RISC was a deadend, that bought up and squashed the ARM, that thought that no one would need more than 8 registers or 640K of memory and all the other crap Intel have spouted since it invented the 4004 and then proceeded to get everything else wrong.

However I think the original poster was thinking about the workstation market, and Intel/AMD machines might well be competitive there.

HP has already x86 machines on offer. I imagine Intel and AMD would be keen to see their a 64 bit chips in a similar sort of setup.

Support will depend on the company who ships the workstation of course.

I think a few people have bought an HP 600

;)

-Shieldwolf

Can be found here.

More info about the new HP security product:
http://www.hp.com/security/products/linux/

The ACM paper is also available here. It is a good description of the compartment model, but the product has some extra features not described in the paper.

• Release Notes
• Admin Guide

• Release Notes
• Admin Guide

A search for "documentation security" on the HP site takes you to an interesting page - follow the hp-tlx link in the index for Administration Guide, Installation Guide and Release Notes.

The paper "An Operating System Approach to Securing e-Services" published in Communications of the ACM Feb 2001 is also of interest since it describes some of the features of the system.

This is the place to go for more information on the product. Quite a lot of technical information, including kernel information. It seems that it's intended to be installed over RedHat in a "layered installation" - diagrams included, as well as performance data.

Here are some of the issues listed on the page:

• secure administration model
• lockdown
• process containment (compartmentalization)
• file system protection (MAC)
• auditing.

Thank you.

--Patrick Bateman, Esq.

Thank you.

--Patrick Bateman, Esq.

Well, as everyone else said, the Titanium is sweet. However, if you can't shell out 3500, you can still get a decent deal. Since you are pointing at the IBM I'm assuming you don't mind a machine that comes preloaded with the Spawn of Evil (TM) and can either use that or reformat. Also, since I work retail in one of my jobs, I'll give you an idea of what you could pick up in a store. HP does pretty well with the N5470, and Compaq is fairly comparable with the 1215US. They should fall around $2100 and $1900 respectively. Toshiba has the 4600 Satellite Pro at $2400 that is pretty good, although I'm not too crazy about the 16MB Trident as the video adapter. That is offset a bit by the fact that it's a bit more rugged than the others. Those are about the best things I see on the sales floor that I'd actually like to use for a laptop. As for under $1000, you could actually probably dredge up a PIII or Duron 600 laptop around somewhere that would do decently. The HP N5470 can be found here. The Compaq 1215 can be found here. And the Toshiba is here.

Why not let the sysadmins who chose to use IIS keep up with the latest security patches and such?

They aren't the ones with the problem:

• Those getting thwacked often don't even know it has happened.
• Code Red is causing more trouble by traffic swamping than it is by nuking some IIS boxes that the admins clearly weren't all that concerned about. This affects everyone, even those who kept their boxes clean.
• If you're an admin in a large organisation, you'll be knee deep in Code Red hassle from desktop boxes you didn't even know existed. M$oft think everyone needed to be running a web server. I wouldn't be surprised if M$oft Barney had an embedded copy of Exchange in it (probably with XML and .NET extensions too). Pervasive intelligence is great, but not when it's coded by the clueless and security-inept morons of M$oft.

I'm amazed this hasn't been mentioned yet...

The HP Omnibook 500 is the best if you're looking for a lightweight, relatively powerful subnotebook. Take a look at HP's page to see the details. My 500 has a 700Mhz PIII, 384 MB RAM, and a 20GB HD - yet it only weighs 3.5 lb! The screen is a bit small at only 1024 x 768, but it is much nicer to travel with than my old all-in-one laptop.

Chris Hanson at MIT has put together a set of Debian packages (distributed via ftp, CD images, or bootdisks) specifically for this laptop. It's just about the most brain dead easy installation you'll find for Linux on a laptop. APM, XFree, sound, built-in NIC - everything except the winmodem works right out of the box.

A complete list: Wireless LAN resources for Linux

Several languages already compile to the JVM, including Smalltalk, Python etc. Someone is nice enough to keep an updated list of them. The advantage the CLR does have is that you have cross-language inheritance, that is your C# class can extend a Java (when the binding is ready) class and so on.

C# is also cleaner than Java to many.

Um, have you actually read the language spec? Any language that uses goto in such ways is evil.

Ostensibly standards-based and open.

Which standards are those? XML? Java has it. SOAP? Java has it. Microsoft has delivered C# to ECMA (here are HP's notes on it), but since the object model is COM/DCOM, what else than their Windows will ever use it?

These two things, plus MS's monopoly, may well be enough to convince or coerce people into dropping Java completely.

Especially the single vendor approach. For Java, there are a huge number of vendors competing with mature tools and libraries. For C#, there is Visual Studio.NET, currently in beta.

All of that sounds pretty cool, but exactly what I'd expect of a trouble ticketting system. I'm more interested in the AI point of view - what makes it so much more special than a trouble ticketting solution from HP or Peregrine?

The company I work for is looking for a new trouble ticketting system at the moment, and this looks pretty interesting. I might prod people and ask them what they think of it. I'm not one of the guys who worries about calling up a web page to try and get a solution - I'm one of the guys who takes the worst of the incidents and makes sure things get done...

It all sounds like fun stuff (the AI) - IF it works well enough... :)

Failing having access to a properly configured emacs, Jed will do in a pinch.

\\\ SLUDGE

Having said that, these machines have their place. Imagine a rack with four of these and two nice disk arrays. A 1 rack, HA server.

if by SGI you mean HP then I have a link for you
here

Jon

The performance results of Dynamo were startling. For example, Dynamo 1.0 could take a native PA-8000 SpecInt95 benchmark binary, created by the production HP PA-8000 C compiler using various optimization levels, and sometimes speed it up more than 20% over the original binary running standalone on the PA-8000 machine.

I wonder if they could run the optimizer without the translation layer (or make a ChipX-to-ChipX dummy translation), and squeak some extra performance out of code on any platform?

The motivation for this project came from our observation that software and hardware technologies appear to be headed in conflicting directions, making traditional performance delivery mechanisms less effective. As a direct consequence of this, we anticipated that dynamic code modification might play an increasingly important role in future computer systems. Consider the following trends in software technology for example. The use of object-oriented languages and techniques in modern software development has resulted in a greater degree of delayed binding, limiting the program scope available to a static compiler, which in turn limits the effectiveness of static compiler optimization. Shrink-wrapped software is shipped as a collection of DLLs (dynamically linked libraries) rather than a single monolithic executable, making whole-program optimization at static compile-time virtually impossible. Even in cases where powerful static compiler optimizations can be applied, the computer system vendors have to depend on the ISV (independent software vendor) to enable these optimizations. But most ISVs are reluctant to do this for a variety of reasons. Advanced compiler optimizations generally slow down compile-times significantly, thus lengthening the software development cycle. Furthermore, a highly optimized binary cannot be debugged using standard debugging tools, making it difficult to fix any bugs that might be reported in the field. The reluctance by ISVs to enable advanced machine specific optimizations puts computer system vendors in a difficult position, because they do not control the keys to unlock the performance potential of their own systems!

Doug Moen.

Oh, really? Tell me, Jonny, from which orifice did you so casually pull that statement?

Allow me to present 78 examples of companies that are each dominating an even more enormous part of the country's economy at this very second.

...and this list doesn't even take historical cases into consideration.

...and, hey! I'll be damned. There are even a few tech companies on that list.

Of course, I realize that the Fortune 500 is not a foolproof, catch-all guide to measuring a company's worth. You'll understand, though, if I have a tad more faith in it than in baseless rantings...