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...found that MP3 users buy as much or more conventional music media (CDs) as non-MP3 users. Admittedly, the study had a fairly small sample size, but it is much more professional and scientific than the above survey. It compares the habits of the two groups of music users with respect to things like discovering new artists, making compilations, and buying music. The results are very interesting to say the least.

Here's a good quote from the paper:

"...like the conventional music users, copying not only encouraged [MP3 users] to experiment with new music, but again did not appear to make them any more reluctant to buy CDs. In fact, some said that this had increased their music purchasing (a finding also confirmed by other questionnaire studies of MP3 users (Jupiter, 2000))"

Overall, the paper backs up pretty much everything that RIAA opponents have been arguing all along.

HP will accept old computer components for recycling. If you have 10 or fewer items visit http://warp.external.hp.com/recycle. They will charge you $13 to $34 per item. They accept all brands, not just HP.

But it comes with an "ATI Technologies® XPERT 2000 PROTM AGP adapter"! Arrgh.

What's painful is that the "twin" system from HP does have a Quadro2. SGI is probably cutting US$600 off the price that way, but... wasn't SGI about graphics in the first place? Looks like the guy that said this is a development tool just to let people play on a SGI Itanium box before the next generation comes out is right, but what will I do with the high-end SGI system once it comes out? File serving? Pleeease!

There is HP WebJetAdmin for Linux here.
And of course the old standby telnet is very useable under Linux.

As for drivers, the LJ 5/6 drivers that come with the last few RedHat releases work fine for me.

i have a palm vx and the foldable keyboard that goes with it. for $400, i can take notes whereever i'm at. if it's inconvenient to put the keyboard down, i can simply write into the palm. my accuracy at this is nearly 100%, and i get, i'd say, about 25-30 words/minute. i type 100 wpm, but all things considered, 30 on the subway making a note of something to do later in the evening is pretty good.

my dad recently got an hp jornada 720 (link) and it has a "3/4" size keyboard. that's in quotes 'cause i haven't measured it or anything. but i can type pretty quickly on this - about 70 words per minute - without much trouble. it takes a little bit of getting used to, but it's definitely possible.

my point is, i'm sure we'll keep coming up with some way to do it. whether it's a foldable keyboard for the palm, handwriting recognition, voice recognition, etc, we'll always be able to input into the tiny devices that organize our lives.

I was thnking abouth the same last night.

The best solution I could come up with is not be one dedicated conference SW, but rather set of capabilities that enable to place any X client application into a conference , e.g. gimp, dia, wordprocessor or local webcam and its display.

1. The first step would be to generate equivalent of HP SharedX.
This would allow to redirect an X-window not only to one X server, but to broadcast it to multiple X-terminals. This would be already workable solution, provided that there is a interface longing out all but one terminal at the time for keyboard/mouse input.

2. The second step would be to multithread the conference enabled application, so that every mouse and keyboard could have its current position and could concurrently draw, paint, write text and do some limited commands.

3. The third part would be to add voice input/output to the X protocol exchange. This is already a problem: You can play a game on a remote computer, but how do you get your sound back home?
Are some people working on this problem?

4. Mixing sounds. Currently under linux it is mostly exclusive, although some sound mixing software exists. Conference audio needs to make two or three preferred speakers audible and suppress the noise from other places.

5. Adding some moderator control pannel, so that he can suppress some participants that shout while other are speaking or otherwise disturb the conference.

Does anyone know anybody working on such a thing?

Petrus Vectorius

I used to have a little leather bound notebook back-in-tha-day, for storing all sorts of little infos I had stumbled across. Then, one day, my little notebook met mr. mud puddle. Stupid of me, yes, and a PDA would suffer the same fate..

But it's a lot frickin' easier to backup a palm than it is to photocopy paper notes!

That's the main reason I use & love my PDA. And there's the jack-of-all-trades, master of none problem, too - and when the magic all-in-one device (inevitably) breaks, you're left without everything. I've got a mp3 player, a palm, a cell phone, and a leatherman, and I wouldn't want any of them crossbreeding. (yet). Might want the mp3 player to do voice record though. My batman factor is kinda high though :).

As for the notebook.. I'll sing in the streets when someone (perferably the manufacturer) releases the specs to the HP 720 so I can have a machine to read usenet and code on. Gotta run a real OS though :). There's a market for subnotes out there that is being axe murderered by WinCE ineptness.

I still program lisp on my HP48 calculator. That thing was (and still is) very cool. Only 128k of memory though, but thats a whole heck of a lot for a little calculator.

• style insensitive names: These sounds like it will cause more confusion and cause more problems than it will solve (that said, is there actually a problem that it solves or was this just a cool feature you thought of hacking in?).
  
  
• using keyword: Be careful about Keonig lookup if your language isn't going to dynamically load classes like Java does. Some people think the "using" or "import" style keywords should behave like #include but they usually are more subtle than that.

• Threading library: Multithreaded programming is more efficient than the using multiple processes and has grown increasingly popular. The fact that languages like C++ do not have a standard threading library unlike Java is a bad blow.
  
  
• Virtual functions: Be consistent with how virtual functions are used. One of the many failings of C++ is that the behavior of virtual functions is completely unintuitive; virtual func s can't be called in a constructor or destructor, lookup for overloaded functions stops at the current class instead of all the way up the inheritance heirarchy, etc. Keep inheritance simple, C++'s private, public vs. protected inheritance is a mess.
  
  
• Platform independent numeric types: Like byte, int32, int8, int64.
  
  
• Code based documentation: Something similar to javadoc or perlpod. It is great to be able to get an overview of a whole project simply by reading documentation generated by the code.
  
  
• Resumable exceptions: The idea that blocks of code in exceptions can be retried is nice but even cooler would be to borrow a leaf from the Smalltalk book and mark exceptions as resumable or not.

Since I'm in Islamic studies, I make extensive use of non-Roman characters, including Arabic as well as Roman transcription for Arabic. Hence, I need a PDA that supports Unicode as well, and in a useable version (i.e. with a unicode-based word processor, which rules out EPOC and PalmOS)

The only pocket OS that does Unicode fairly well and is in the market already is Windows CE, I'm ashamed to say, and the only CE PDA with a keyboard is the $800 HP Jornada 700 series (the older 680 and 690 as well), all of which are damn expensive.

So, does anyone know of another keyboard PDA with an operating system that supports Unicode that is either available already or under development? Will the pocket versions of Linux support Unicode? (The Qt-based developments should, I think.) Has anyone ever used Unicode on a PDA? I'd be really interested.

I've been on the same quest for the last couple of months -- ever since I decided to fly to my clan's next big LAN party in Salt Lake City. I'm not taking a monitor, but I'm definitely taking my own computer. If I didn't, I'd end up spending hours reconfiguring somebody elses computer to match my normal setup.

I recently acquired the carcass to my Mom's old HP Pavilion 4455. It's bigger than I had hoped for, but it's smaller than my mini-tower game systems. The case has just enough room for a microATX board with 1 AGP, 2 PCI and 1 ISA slots. It has one 5.25" bay for the CDROM, a 3.5" bay for the floppy, and the hard drive bolts vertically to the front of the case. It also has a pathetic sound/modem board that I promptly discarded. I'm going to give it a test run with the original motherboard, a Celeron 500 and a GeForce2 GTS video card. If that's not good enough for Tribes 2, I'll dump that motherboard and buy a newer P3 capable MATX motherboard -- I'm pretty sure a standard MATX board will fit in the case. I'd rather do Athlon but I can't find an MATX Athlon board

I'd prefer to build my own LAN party system from scratch but I haven't been able to find empty cases this small anywhere. It seems like there's a niche market here that somebody could fill -- I've got a lot of friends that would also like to build or buy a small LAN party system without paying the premium for a laptop. I'm looking forward to the time when prices on LCD monitors come down -- those are perfect for LAN party systems, but they're still too expensive for most gamers.

There are several programs for this.

lbxproxy works with X. Part of it actually comes with XFree86.

DXPC is an oldie but goodie. It requires you to use it on both server and client end though.

And good old SSH compression is usually good enough. Turn on X forwarding, turn up the compressiona and usually you're good to go.

I haven't found VNC to be very good for bandwidth, but you might want to try a VNC compressor like this.

- Serge Wroclawski

There is something called SOUP, which is something like a SOAP for binary data: The Simple Object Update Protocol (SOUP) specifies an content-transfer model for digital "appliances" like cameras, printers, scanners, picture frames, personal digital assistants, cell phones, machine control systems, and so on. SOUP standardizes simple but important communications between content-rich devices. It uses Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) messages to push content from one device into another. The approach resembles the way web browsers pull content from web servers. SOUP works with only two device "actions": 1)HTTP GET to obtain the device or service object state as a SOAP serialization and 2)HTTP POST to set the device state as well control the transfer of content. SOUP supports simple transfer, transfer with job control, indirect transfer (URL based), and content negotiation. SOUP does not preclude additional actions on devices; it exists to make simple actions simple.

If the course was about building complex systems, then borrowing other code would probably be OK.. As long as you make it clear what's you're code, and what came from elsewhere. If the course was about learning how to write programs, then 'borrowing' someone elses' code would be against the purpose of the course.

Think about it for a second. Just about any problem simple enough for a beginner programer to solve already has a solution written. Bubble sort? No problem. Quick sort? Right here!. You can get a garbage collector from this page. (none of these took me more than a minute to find with google).

So how are you going to actually learn how to program if all you're doing is stealing other people's code. More importantly: How do you learn how to fix problems with code if you're doing this?

Of course, it would be hell for an instructor. If you wanted to force your students to write their own code, the only problems that you could give them would be problems that even the best experts hadn't been able to solve.

Welcome to computing 101. This week I'm going to be teaching you about loops. To force you all to write your own code, I'm going to assign each one of you a different device for which the manufacturer has not released specs. Your first assignment is to reverse engineer your device and write a device driver using a polling loop.

Any questions?

http://www.hp.com/jornada/products/newsroom/others /notice_proposal.html

I don't need a handheld -- what I *do* need is an ultralight notebook device, with excellent battery life (>10 hrs), and a reasonable keyboard. The HP Jornada 820, with its 190 MHz StrongARM CPU is almost exactly what I need except:

1) It only runs WinCE. I want GNU/Linux, dammit! (preferably Debian, but all HP has to do is open up the hardware, and I'm sure Debian ARM will be quickly adapted to support it).

2) A built-in IBM Microdrive would be a nice touch (although this can be installed as a card, an internal would allow me to use the slot for other purposes).

3) It probably has a winmodem, so Free Software drivers for the winmodem would be desireable if it's to be used effectively with a GNU OS.

Otherwise, the Jornada 820 has everything I need. The StrongARM CPU in this thing gives excellent performance (compared to x86), with much lower power consumption (and the new xScale versions of this chip are awesome). The keyboard seems pretty good for such a small device, and battery life is something like 12 hours (!) on these things. Perfect.

Why can't HP make me one?

Furthermore, I think it would be interesting to know what kind of open source OpenMail was based on. Suppose it was GPL-ed code, that would mean HP could be forced to open things up. But I don't think that will be the case, I can't imagine a company like HP violating GPL like that. Still it would be interesting to know where the fundaments of OpenMail came from.

It's not a calculator company. Calculators are the gnat on the ass of this $49 Billion elephant.

It's not Test and Measurement. That's Agilent.

It's not 83 different companies.

It's one company, it has a strategy, and whether you like it or not, OpenMail does not fit this strategy.

HP will probably take the relevant parts of OpenMail and the great engineers working on it and focus them on contributing to the strategy.

Nowhere in the HP Way does it state that HP has to please everybody all the time. This includes employees and customers.

What it DOES say in the HP way is that HP will be ethical and fair. It will continue to support its OpenMail customers (or make sure that they are supported) while at the same time admitting that this is a dead-end product for HP and you are free to go elsewhere. And if you want help getting there, call HP and they will do anything from pointing you to Exchange or Sendmail or Notes or whatever to sending an army of HP consultants out to hold your hand.

Memory management in C++

There are two things you can do if you're lazy and somewhat allergic to new and delete, like I am.

1) Use the Standard Template Library. This isn't empasized enough in C++ courses. If you learn it and use it properly, you will drastically cut down on the news and deletes that you need to use in your programs. The STL containers own their objects, so you can stick an object (not a pointer or reference to an object) into a container and forget about it. When the container disappears, the object will be destroyed. This doesn't negate the necessity for a programmer to think about memory management, but it eases the burden greatly. Be careful though, stupid implementations can result in a lot of time wasted in the copy constructor.

2) Use the truly excellent Boehm garbage collection library. This page has all the good information about it.

C++ isn't perfect, but what language is?

This is similar to the HP e-pc. It's not what I'm looking for, though.

I'm big into network games, and I want a small system that I can easily tote to LAN parties or to friends houses. I haven't been able to find anything that fits the bill. Neither the Nano PC or the e-pc will work because of the lack of good 3D graphics, or an AGP slot. (The i810 3D graphics decelerator is laughable.)

What I'm looking for would be in a slightly larger package, and have the following features:

• P3 or Athlon CPU
• AGP graphics slot
• At least 128MB RAM
• Integrated sound with headphone port
• Integrated network
• Internal HD, at least 18GB (so I can dual boot Linux and that other OS)
• CDROM or DVD-ROM drive
• USB ports

In other words, I want something virtually identical to the Nano PC, except for the addition of an AGP video slot. I know you can't do that with the i810 chipset, but I'd rather have it based on an Athlon anyway.

Has anybody seen such an animal in the wild?

I've also been looking for smaller desktop cases to build my own small system with, but I haven't been able to find any at all. Every desktop case I've found, on the web or in shops, is huge, with lots of drive bays I don't need. They're actually bigger than the mini-tower I use for my gaming system now.

This is a press release where HP is announcing (among other things) Linux-compatible drivers [...] for more than 30 HP Deskjet color inkjet printers, including models from the 600, 800 and 900 series. What kind of quality and functionality one will get from these is something we'll probably have to wait and see...

I'm pretty sure this part can be done in 5-20 minutes on my machine by recoding the algorithm to use a join (using the join(1) command) and am testing that now, but don't unfortunately have a bunch of time to spend on it.

I'll put a patch, not guaranteed to work, at http://puffin.external.hp.com/~bame/, if anyone's interested, hopefully tomorrow. Or e-mail me if there's a better place to send this possibly broken patch (besides sending it to Rusty when it seems to be working well).

• Compaq (Tru64)
• Quote from IBM WebSphere site"V3.5 supports Windows NT, Windows 2000, Solaris, AIX, AS/400 and HP-UX. V3.02 supports Red Hat Linux, Caldera Linux, OS/390 and Novell Netware"
• HP
  

True, Sun does not actively provide support to all of the other platforms -- but the people who write those platforms generally do (and who better?)... For example, the BlackDown distro of the JVM supports Debian, RedHat, Slackware, and SuSe for x86, PowerPC, Alpha, and SPARC. Besides, Sun support for that PLATFORM would only be necessary if your are writing the VM. The java binary is the same regardless of platform.

Me too. The first machine I ever programmed was a friend's HP25. (I was 9 years old; I couldn't afford my own.) Now I make my living programming.

Thanks, Bill.

I don't believe in an afterlife, but if there is one, I know they use RPN in heaven. God would have taken more than a seven days to create the world if he had to remember how many parentheses he had open.

Was it this or this that killed him? I'm sorry he lived to see what happend to his once-great company.

I understand California is experiencing a shortage in electricy supply.

Given the shit HP sell today, attaching a pair of generators to Messrs. Hewlett & Packard ought to solve that problem.

(Current owner of HP45, HP97, HP9815, HP31E, HP34C, HP41CV, HP16C, HP28S, HP38, and two HP48G calculators, HP9845B, HP85, and HP45711B computers, HP1707B oscilloscope, and HP1615A logic analyzer.)

A pretty detailed and interesting bio on Mr. Hewlett from the company:

http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/hewlett/index2.h tm

--

He's an inspiring man.

rr

Another nice write up over at HP.com
http://www.hp.com/Redirect/gw/useng_welcome/featur eA/=http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/hewlett/inde x2.htm

Some Additional Linux Distribution Suggestions

• Caldera Systems
• Turbo Linux
• SuSE
• Mandrake

• Sun/Open Office
• Applix/Applixware Office
• Oracle
• HP
• Compaq
• Dell
• GNU

• Osborne/McGraw-Hill
• O'Reilly
• Sybex

I dont have any experience with this subject personally, but ive been doing research on it myself. This page is the best source of info Ive found:
www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Jean_Tourrilhes/Linux/
It has the howto plus hundreds of links to related info around the web. Check it out!
maken

Way back before Wired's online presence got bought out by Lycos, they experimented with this format. The interstitial ads were everywhere on the site, but were perhaps most annoying when trying to get to their "Threads" discussions (long since gone). There was an overwhelmingly negative response. One friend of mine went as far as to inject ads for his own nascent web design company into his posts on their discussion groups, then crow, "Let's see how you like it!"

The problem is that regardless of what streaming multimedia enthusiasts would have you believe, the web is most often used like a big phone book. Or a magazine. Sure, more often than not, the magazine is Hustler, but people are flipping through indexes (Yahoo, Google, Alta Vista, AskJeeves, MySimon) to find the content they really want (porn, home electronics, news, music). It's not like a TV where we expect a certain show to be on a certain channel at a certain time, which is exactly what makes television ads work. Banner ads are, in some sense, more appropriate than interstitial ones because they look more like magazine ads.

The only reason magazine-style ads don't work in the online world is because display technology has such a long way to go. Think about the number, density, and (comperable) quality of the quarter or half page ads in the average color glossy monthly publication. Think about putting something like on a single web page, so that you could get ad and content on the screen simultaneously, without compromising the readability or navigability of either. It's enough to give a web designer fits.

Ironically, it looks like Wired has gone back to interstitial ads on their Hotwired site. Pity. It's a long time since that site has been useful for anything (other than as a portal to Webmonkey, Wired, or what appears to be their biggest advertiser, but I remember when there was some pretty good political and social commentary on that site. Sigh.

Let's see. Depending on who you want to sell on the issue, we certainly have the big boys. IBM , HP and quite likely Compaq (the TrueUnix/VMS folks, not the crappy box assemblers) can quite likely deliver expensive support and professional Linux services. Of course it's up to you to determine the quality. But you also have to do that when EDS is shipping 10 of their clones with bad haircuts to you.

Then there are specialized companies whose most prominent representation is probably Linuxcare.

Finally and - in my experience most importantly there are the distributers who base their business model basically on services. I had outstanding experiences with SuSE (American site) which guided me through struggles getting X up on my notebook. They made a very idealistic, determined and goal oriented impression and delivered far better support then what I've seen with companies that charge $1/4 million a year (and that was the free issue installation support). They run a professional services department and they have various support plans including 24/7 - and dedicated resource plans. Pricing looks quite reasonable.

I can't vouch for Red Hat, Mandrake , or Caldera, but at least Red Hat has a good reputation.

So, here we go. There's a lot around to chose from and compare. If the gentlemen in the suits insist on an IBMHPSUNDEC rubber stamp, here you go and you probably pay for it through your nose. Not that the distributers quite give away theire services, but from what I've seen there seems to be excellent value there.

This is like MS claiming to have invented a new technology when they came out with their "optical mouse".

Well, they did. All previous optical mice required grids. Microsoft's mouse uses a camera and software capable of comparing images very quickly to determine speed and direction. A far cry from grid-based optical mice.

Yes it was a breakthrough, but it was invented not by Microsoft, but by Gary Gordon at HP Labs. I hope Microsoft had to pay a lot for the right to not mention HP in all the publicity.

I know that VA Linux sells some systems that have 16 memory slots (yes, Intel machines!).

here is a link to a HP server that supports up to 128GB of memory in one box. I know it's a high end unix server, but wasn't itanium intel's pathetic attempt to compete with these kind of machines?

then there is the coveted Sun Enterprise 1000 which seems to support up to 68GB of RAM, plus a bunch of others from SUN

Then there is this bad-boy from IBM, which supports up to 96GB

Of course there are the Alpha servers, of which the GS series is an example. Up to 256MB.

There are boards that support way more than 8 RAM slots and have been for some time. Hell, you can get a system that supports more than 16GB from ebay.

PS, anyone who wants to donate one of the linked systems, please reply to this and we will arrange something :-).

-----
# cd /

on this one page they claim Linux support for their new HP 2200/2250 printers: Wider operating system compatibility (Yeah, right) The only pity is that the base model, the 2200, does not and will probably not ever get supported, as it's another variation of a WinPrinter. HP keeps sending me those automated responses, but so far they haven't fixed the lies on that page (Like "Lower printing costs"). I don't think I'll ever buy HP again.

Isn't this the same as saying "To write bug-free software, merely write software with no bugs in it?"

Especially easy to avoid if you confine new/delete to constr/destr. Makes it much easier to find memory leaks than in classic C, because you only have to consider class scope for the use of that memory. Toughest part is when destructors dont get called properly- but you get used to that one.

Yes, yes, it's nicer than C, but then what if you need to share objects? Two instances of an object, but only one chunk of memory? You don't want to double-free, nor do you want to free out memory that the other copy is using. Ah, that's when you pull out the reference counted smart pointers. But those aren't so great all the time either: every pointer access (method & fields!) requires extra steps, the bookkeeping is expensive itself, and if you like hiding the fact that you're ref counting behind a envelope/letter structure, it fucks up your inheritence tree (since you have a handle->implementation pair for every class, where normally you'd just have an implementation). All this time, be sure to pass all objects by reference so that ctors aren't called during method calls, and don't return references to local objects from methods. What a pain! And lets not even mention the hellish nature of exception handling or thread safety. auto_ptr, anyone?

Compare that to the memory bloat problem: no real way to duck that one without taking a hit somewhere else.

Explain. Just don't create objects as much. Re-use them. Make pools and caches.

Sure you program works- but what is people biggest complaint about it now: slowness.

Isn't this a far better complaint than "Your program doesn't work"?

How so? You see where all objects are created--you see where they're stored--simply cache frequently new()'ed objects. OptimizeIt for Java has a very fine heap analysis program which shows which objects are taking up most of the heap, and where they were allocated (all the while, remember: it's not finding bugs, your program is working the whole time). And for an objective way to tell if you've fixed the problem: what's wrong with vmstat or top?

Whereas with a typical compiled program, once there are no memory leaks, any optimizations are pure bonus- and usually very easy to figure out how to do/implement.

I'd say it's much easier to optimize GC'ed languages. Need a local reference to an object, but don't want to worry about memory leaks? Go ahead, copy the reference. Want to cache objects, but don't want to run Purify again? No problem: just create a pool and hold onto another reference. Sling pointers (oops, references) around with wild abandon: it'll all be fine. Once you're freed from having to worry about memory lossage, you'll have a bunch of time to work on the important optimizations: your algorithms. And that's what's really important, right?

You don't even need to resort to Java in order to bask in the luxury of Letting The Computer Work For You. Try the Boehm collector for C/C++. It compiles for Linux & Win32 among others. Just subclass your objects from 'GC', and then just new() new() new(). And don't worry about delete(), ever again.

It sounds to me like you're an investor.

Are you an investor in HP? An investor in another company mentioned in your post? If so you should disclose this in your post.

Now, do you keep up on their financials? If not, here's some information for you, taken from HP's latest quarterly:

--------

Net revenue, in millions, 12 months ending Oct. 31, 2000.

Imaging and Printing Systems: $20,476
Computing Systems: $21,095
IT Services: $7,129
Other: $1,299

Total Revenue: $48,782

Earnings, in millions, 12 months ending Oct. 31, 2000

Imaging and Printing Systems: $2,746
Computing Systems: $960
IT Services: $634
Other: ($103)

Total Earnings: $3,889

--------

So, while it is true that they earn the most money from "Printing and Imaging Systems," they're hardly a "dud of a company." And if you really get down into HP's financials, you'll find some interesting things - their largest growth sector was Asia at 61% over 1999, and their fastest growth in "Printing and Imaging" happens to be in imaging:

Imaging revenues grew 31% over the year-ago quarter, fueled by strong growth in all-in-one (AiO's) products (up 31%), scanners (up 13%) and digital cameras (up 137%).

I hope this has been at least a little enlightening. HP is not doomed now, and certainly wouldn't be if HPUX dropped off the face of the planet this evening and HP never sold another server again. And their interest / investment in Linux shows they know where their money comes from. It won't be long before their AiO's and digital cameras will be running embeded linux along with their print servers.

Cheers,

Jon

Disclaimer: I don't own any publicly traded stock.

It depends on what wireless technology you're using, but here in my own private geek compound I run Orinoco (Lucent) Wavelan Gold wireless cards in 128-bit RC4 encryption mode.

This is quite easy to set up under Linux using the wireless extensions to the standard pcmcia services . You will have a switch branch in your wireless.opts file that looks something like

# Default Lucent Wavelan IEEE
# Note : wvlan_cs driver only,
# and version 1.0.4+ for encryption support
*,*,*,00:60:1D:*)
INFO="Wavelan IEEE ad-hoc"
ESSID="Secure Network"
MODE="Ad-hoc"
CHANNEL="3" #2.422GHz
RATE="auto"
KEY="1234-5648-9abc-def1-2345-6789-ab"
;;
(No, that's not my actual key :). And note it's not the full 128 bits... the version of the drivers I have won't permit that, for some reason that I don't understand. But 104 bits is pretty good.)

Anyway, you definitely want to "lock down" your network, unless you are into to providing a public access point. Without encryption, it would be like having a hub on my DSL modem that anybody driving by could plug in to...

--Seen

Achieving High Levels of Instruction-Level Parallelism with Reduced Hardware Complexity is the only link to the project I can find at HP Labs.

BIG FREAKING MEMORY LEAK!!

I really don't understand why people put up with this kind of thing when there are perfectly good C/C++ garbage collectors out there. If you know you've got a memory leak, and you just can't fix it, it's downright criminal to ship a product without garbage collection.

In the vein of BXXP and SOAP, have a look at something simpler, more true to XML and free (libre), Extensible Protocol.

Some of the commercially-developed UNIX systems have successfully used this feature to handle enterprise workloads. For example, HP-UX has long derived a unique advantage from its Dynamic Memory Resilience feature, which allows a server to sustain single-bit errors (see HP-UX 11i specs). If the Linux implementation of this function can also be made to work dynamically, i.e. fence off memory that goes bad during runtime, it will be a huge step forward for establishing Linux as a true enterprise alternative.

---

It needs to hire people that know what they're doing. If any part of the government is going to be involved with customized software or hardware, there should be people in-house to handle those needs. Maybe not at the local level, but at least at the state a federal levels. The fact that jobs get contracted out to the lowest bidder is stupid, as many things in government are.

One of the contributing problems is that nobody wants to work for the government due to the red tape. Those that do, only do so mainly because they see the money, and realize that there is nobody there to verify their work.

Example: Local town clerks office hired a consultant group to network all the machines together and setup a way to get e-mail through just one computer on a dial-up. The consultants installed Exchange server and then couldn't figure out how to set it up. So, they called the company I work for (ISP that provided the dial-up) and expected us to spend hours on the phone trying to get Exchange server configured. The consultants were on that job for over 4 weeks, and I don't know the exact cost, but I would assume at least $35+ an hour.

Anybody that has "Consultant" in their title should automatically be disqualified from working on any technological project.

Back to the topic though. What would be the purpose of the government open-sourcing all it's code. It's not "their" code. The code was created by somebody that was awarded a contract to do the job. Who would manage the code if it was opened. If the government appointed somebody to manage the code, what are the chances that they would be qualified enough. They could let some hackers back-door into the code base and where would that get us? Then we'd need a peer review system, and who would be part of that?

Truth is, the government should spend more resources on doing whatever needs to be done to make everything run more effeciently throughout the country. It's easy for everybody on /. to condemn the government for having inadequate security, since we deal with it on a regular basis. Don't get me wrong, I'm not standing up for them, but websites shouldn't get the governments primary responsibility. Everybody's getting caught up in the web, and they're trying to turn it into something magical instead of something functional. Look at Samsung or HP. They chose to focus on making a static image fairly appealing. However, it's not functional.

Ok, it's late and I'm out of caffiene. I think I spelled out enough problems here, and while they probably aren't grammatically correct, or show a proper thought process, I hope you get what I'm saying. Basically, the whole system sucks, and who freaking cares, because whatever they do, we complain about, and whatever we do, they complain about.

• A good place to start might be http://jobs.hp.com/.
• Agilent is a spin-off of some HP divisions, they also take interns: http://jobs.agilent.com.
• Finally, HP spun off it's Mechanical Design Division into CoCreate Software, whose jobs page is here.

It's not what you're looking for, but maybe other readers could use this.

I saw an ad for one of these and they sound neat. HP has a box that sounds perfect for small offices and workgroups. It's kind of like a backup appliance. The desktops and laptops install client software and backup to this server. No magic there. But when it's time to recover a machine, the box can burn a bootable CD that will restore the machine to the last backup. Pretty nifty.

You're right that "trusted" systems are probably useless as webservers or whatever.

Some people don't agree. It is actually a significant product that has won awards for HP. Of course it is useless to anyone else; see patent US5903732 "secure Web platform (SWP) implementing a mandatory access control policy" etc.

Trusted Solaris

HP Virtual Vault Based on HP-UX CMW

SCO CMW

Of course all of these are CMW products which meet a slightly different set of criteria...

11. What are the CMWREQs and the CMWEC?

The criteria used by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) to rate a product as a Compartmented Mode Workstation (CMW) was the Compartmented Mode Workstation Evaluation Criteria (CMWEC), which superseded the CMW Requirements (CMWREQs) in 1991. This criteria defined a minimum level of assurance equivalent to the B1 level of the TCSEC (see TCSEC Criteria Concepts FAQ, Questions 9-11). It also defines a minimum set of functionality and usability features outside the scope of the TCSEC (e.g. a graphical user interface via a window system was required along with the capability to cut and paste between windows). Neither set of requirements are currently to evaluate products although products that are designed to have these features may be evaluated with the Common Criteria for Information Technology Security Evaluation (CCITSE).