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http://www.hpl.hp.com/cambridge/projects/Dynamo/do cs.htm

Dynamo as a Virtual Machine Accelerator (PDF)

The Dynamo team has been at it since 1997 and the writeup is dated June 1999, does anyone know what HP is doing with it?

anyone know of a good 802.11 PCI card with both MacOS and Linux drivers?

PCI? no. ISA, and PCMCIA, yes, at 2Mb/sec - fast enough for printers and internet.

Webgear has some decent wireless cards. The ISA is little but an adapter for the PCMCIA cards, and there's a difference between the "2.4" line and the PRO line. It seems that due to some foulup, 2.4's are 802.11 "compatible" while the Pro line are "compliant." In other words, if you need to mix brands, go with PRO, but otherwise save your money. There is the 2.4 networking kit, that for way less than $200US gives you 2 PCMCIA cards and ISA adapters.

If you're interested, the cheapest place that I've found them is PCNation.

And thanks to Jean Tourrilhes here are the drivers.

TangoChaz

"It's not enough to be on the right track -- you have to be moving faster than the train." -- Rod Davis, Editor of Seahorse Mag.

What are your thoughts on HP making money on samba?

How do you see development changing with a corporation having a vested interest?

The only origional design to the iMac is the rounded translucent design. All-in-the-screen designs have existed for a long time (The origional Macs, Compaq made some PCs, etc)

Maybe they should sue HP and TI. The HP49 is rounded and has a translucent cover. And look the these covers that TI sells for some of their calculators.

The only origional design to the iMac is the rounded translucent design. All-in-the-screen designs have existed for a long time (The origional Macs, Compaq made some PCs, etc)

Maybe they should sue HP and TI. The HP49 is rounded and has a translucent cover. And look the these covers that TI sells for some of their calculators.

First, this is not a web-only service. We do like to provide web interfaces to as much as possible, but we do realize that for some things, program compliation and testing included, nothing can substitute for shell access.

A lot of people are asking about other hardware architectures and OS's. For now, the Compile Farm is i386 based, and contains several Linux distributions and FreeBSD. This does not mean that we have ruled out other possibilities. This is just another step in what we hope can be an expanding feature set for Open Source developers on SourceForge.

There is a lot of setup involved in something like this Compile Farm, not the least of which is having thousands of skilled Open Source developers with shell accounts on a set of boxes. We're attempting to keep things as secure as possible while also offering enough features to make this thing useful. One reason for the limited number of distributions/architectures/OS's now is the limitation of variables in a very complex system. Hopefully, we can work out the kinks in this system soon so that it can become a valuable resource to developers who might not otherwise have the capability of getting their hands on so many different machines.

Please be patient as we test this new system. We're definately open to criticism, but please also be constructive with it so that we can continue to improve these services. Thanks to all of the SourceForge users who have contributed patches, criticism, and helpful suggestions. Every day my confidence in the Open Source model increases...

richi.

You are right in saying that having to package the same program n times because there exist n Linux distributions is annoying.

However I disagree with your comparison with the Unix situations. This comparison has been agressively fed to the press by Microsoft, although it is vastly inaccurate:

• Unix vendors (such as Sun, HP) sold proprietary operating systems running on incompatible hardware platforms. While paying lip service to API compatibility, they kept APIs very much incompatible with each other. Compiling a package on several of these systems meant maintaining a database of various weirdnesses.
• Linux vendors sell the same free operating system on the same platforms. They basically sell a copy of the same free software. APIs are mostly identical. Differences between distributions as for software programmers are minimal, and efforts are being made to lessen them (for instance, for configuration files).

The cool thing about this reader is that I can have two PCMCIA slots on the FRONT (it goes in a 3.5 or 5.25" drive bay -- adapter included) of my PC, so I can also read things like digital camera flash cards. This is an ISA card, btw but then again it's only PCMCIA so you can't expect really high bandwidth.

Overall, the installation of the hardware took 15 minutes and configuring/compiling the software/drivers took around 3 hours after poking around to get ad-hoc networking up. After that it's been extremely reliable and very tolarant of me pulling out the card and reinserting it on the fly.

I found this web page really helpful for the configuration: here .

First of all, I'd like to say that garbage collection is an extremely useful thing to have in a programming language. If you use C++ you can get Boehm's garbage collector which is described here. I use this collector and it works well for me.

Now, having said that, I find that the Standard Template Library is the other extremely useful thing to have. G++ has a really great implementation (so sorry to you folks stuck on Microsoft VC++) that WILL make your life easier. strings, vectors, and hashes! Learn those and a few of the generic algorithms and you can attack most of your problems. The remarkable thing is that you can do gobs of stuff with STL without using pointers and mallocs at all! Seriously folks, if you're into C then you should check out C++ using the two features I mentioned. You will be amazed at what you can do. You most likely won't need to malloc your own memory. And if you do, you can rely on the garbage collector to clean it up for you.

OK, I'm done. I just love C++ and since I started using the collector and the STL I love it even more.

One of the the features that C++ can be said to lack, as a high-level language, is a garbage collector. Or rather, it's not so much that no collector exists (the Hans Boehm conservative C/C++ garbage collector is one, after all) but the fact that it isn't well integrated in the C/C++ API.

Do you regret this? Do you think someday we'll have a decent programming language with a garbage collector (i.e. one which is well integrated in the language and not just an add-on)? Java might have been just that only its eficiency (notably that of the GC) was terrible: do you think that was a necessity or just a consequence of the wrong decisions being made?

HP OpenMail. I haven't used it, but from all I've heard, it's a drop in Exchange replacement that works better, is cheaper, and generally sucks less. Jon

Some HP notebooks, such as the OmniBook 4150 or 900, have dual pointing devices, with both an eraser- head and a touchpad. There's also two sets of mouse keys: one over the touchpad for if you're using the trackpoint, and one below for if you'd rather use the touchpad. This is the ideal solution, IMO, one I'd like to see more of.

Some HP notebooks, such as the OmniBook 4150 or 900, have dual pointing devices, with both an eraser- head and a touchpad. There's also two sets of mouse keys: one over the touchpad for if you're using the trackpoint, and one below for if you'd rather use the touchpad. This is the ideal solution, IMO, one I'd like to see more of.

HP Labs demonstrated a molecular logic gate last July. See the article here or news coverage at ABC News.

From linux-2.3.35/include/asm-ia64/ptrace.h it's obvious that IA64 has 31 general purpose regs and 31 general FPU regs!

And it's obvious from this page from a document that's been out for quite a while that it has 128 general-purpose regs and 128 floating-point regs, although it uses a register window scheme so you may have to shuffle windows to get at more than the 32 global registers and the 32 registers in the current window (at least for the general registers).

Documentation for the user-mode side of IA-64 has been available for a while; take your choice of Intel's PDF version, HP's PDF version, or HP's HTML version.

(There's some other IA-64 documentation on the HP site, e.g. the IA-64 Software Conventions and Runtime Architecture manual and, if a link to it hasn't already been posted, (an old - August 1999) paper on "The Making of Linux/ia64".

From linux-2.3.35/include/asm-ia64/ptrace.h it's obvious that IA64 has 31 general purpose regs and 31 general FPU regs!

And it's obvious from this page from a document that's been out for quite a while that it has 128 general-purpose regs and 128 floating-point regs, although it uses a register window scheme so you may have to shuffle windows to get at more than the 32 global registers and the 32 registers in the current window (at least for the general registers).

Documentation for the user-mode side of IA-64 has been available for a while; take your choice of Intel's PDF version, HP's PDF version, or HP's HTML version.

(There's some other IA-64 documentation on the HP site, e.g. the IA-64 Software Conventions and Runtime Architecture manual and, if a link to it hasn't already been posted, (an old - August 1999) paper on "The Making of Linux/ia64".

From linux-2.3.35/include/asm-ia64/ptrace.h it's obvious that IA64 has 31 general purpose regs and 31 general FPU regs!

And it's obvious from this page from a document that's been out for quite a while that it has 128 general-purpose regs and 128 floating-point regs, although it uses a register window scheme so you may have to shuffle windows to get at more than the 32 global registers and the 32 registers in the current window (at least for the general registers).

Documentation for the user-mode side of IA-64 has been available for a while; take your choice of Intel's PDF version, HP's PDF version, or HP's HTML version.

(There's some other IA-64 documentation on the HP site, e.g. the IA-64 Software Conventions and Runtime Architecture manual and, if a link to it hasn't already been posted, (an old - August 1999) paper on "The Making of Linux/ia64".

From linux-2.3.35/include/asm-ia64/ptrace.h it's obvious that IA64 has 31 general purpose regs and 31 general FPU regs!

And it's obvious from this page from a document that's been out for quite a while that it has 128 general-purpose regs and 128 floating-point regs, although it uses a register window scheme so you may have to shuffle windows to get at more than the 32 global registers and the 32 registers in the current window (at least for the general registers).

Documentation for the user-mode side of IA-64 has been available for a while; take your choice of Intel's PDF version, HP's PDF version, or HP's HTML version.

(There's some other IA-64 documentation on the HP site, e.g. the IA-64 Software Conventions and Runtime Architecture manual and, if a link to it hasn't already been posted, (an old - August 1999) paper on "The Making of Linux/ia64".

From linux-2.3.35/include/asm-ia64/ptrace.h it's obvious that IA64 has 31 general purpose regs and 31 general FPU regs!

And it's obvious from this page from a document that's been out for quite a while that it has 128 general-purpose regs and 128 floating-point regs, although it uses a register window scheme so you may have to shuffle windows to get at more than the 32 global registers and the 32 registers in the current window (at least for the general registers).

Documentation for the user-mode side of IA-64 has been available for a while; take your choice of Intel's PDF version, HP's PDF version, or HP's HTML version.

(There's some other IA-64 documentation on the HP site, e.g. the IA-64 Software Conventions and Runtime Architecture manual and, if a link to it hasn't already been posted, (an old - August 1999) paper on "The Making of Linux/ia64".

HP's WebJetAdmin is network printer config/management software that supports RedHat.

"Did you know that Windows 2000 hasn't been released yet? Even though Microsoft has announced that it is finished working on it and has distributed it to certain major players, it is not publically available yet."

That's funny because HP is now selling computers with Windows 2000.

HP computers with Windows 2000

No, HP has nothing to do with Project Monterey. HP has been working with Intel on the design of Merced processor and has been doing a lot of work on the next 64-bit processor, McKinley. HP is working on a 64-bit HP-UX for Merced. More info about Monterey can be found here. More info on Intel and HP partnership here

I'm not the original poster, but try installing Linux on an HP NetServer LXr-8500. Of course, you can't find drivers for much of the hardware, such as the fibre channel HBAs or the RAID controllers. Even if you could, which OS would make better use of eight Xeons, 4GB RAM, two Gigabit ATM NICs, and 250GB RAID storage, Linux or NT? I realize some /. poster will claim that his 486-SX/33MHz with 16MB RAM is faster running Linux than any SMP NT box, but honestly, is Linux ready for the enterprise?

HP has a clone that emulates _all_ the functionallity of echange server. The location of the site is here.

And there is even an offer of 50 free licenses! And the web based mail interface looks awesome.

I liked the article. Brian Livingstone was fair to both Microsoft and Linux. He basically pointed out that consumers want stability and security, two features that Microsoft fails to deliver and that Linux does deliver.

He wants Microsoft to improve their products and sees Linux as pointing the way to a better computer platform, one that has stability, security, and ease of use.

But Mr. Livingstone is still missing the big picture. The reason that Linux is gaining such a big share is that Linux uses open standards. Linux works and plays well with others. Linux doesn't want to be the only choice. Linux wants to be one of many choices.

And Linux runs on just about every computer platform right now that will support a multitasking OS. Everything from palmtops, to routers, to the desktop, to servers, all the way up to the most powerful supercomputers in the world.

Most of the software that runs on Linux also runs on a dozen other OSes. If your samba server under Linux doesn't have enough power, put in a Sun Enterprise server in its place, also running samba.

In contrast, Microsoft makes proprietary every standard that they touch. They can't seem to help themself. Everyone uses sendmail, they use exchange. Everyone uses java, they use j++. They are even trying to pervert perl right now by adding windows only extentions to the language. Microsoft does want to be your only choice.

Microsoft runs only on one platform. The x86. Given that there is a wide range of power in this venerable processor and the IA64 is coming, but even then you don't have much choice of vendors.

Microsoft only writes applications for one platform. Yes, they have done a little work with the macs, but only as an after thought.

I think that Linux is the tip of a new way of doing things that gives the consumer maximum choice.

I think that Bill is just now realizing that. Microsoft will need to change and change radically to keep any of their marketshare. You may not even recognize MS in a few years.

I submitted this to Slashdot's Your Rights Online section some weeks ago, but it was rejected. I think the article is pertinent here.

Recent stories on Slashdot have told of the ongoing "tennis match" between digital content providers versus consumers and technically skilled people. The recent cracking of DVD's Content Scrambling System (CSS) lent ammunition to the opinion held by computing professionals and users that copy protection systems are doomed to fail. The effort has been likened to building a dam against the ocean; a foolish and useless exercise. In Slashdot discussion fora, the point has often been raised, "If you can perceive it, you can copy it. What are they going to do, encrypt the bits all the way to the speaker/electron gun?" If the Copy Protection Technical Working Group gets its way, that is precisely what's going to happen.

I received a piece of email spam today, which actually turned out to be useful (probably the only time that's ever happened anywhere). It directed me to a flat panel display industry group. Among others, one of the links pointed to the California Display Network, which had a link pointing to technical info on flat panel technology. Since I currently earn my living writing graphics card and display drivers, I clicked through to see what I could learn.

I found an entry for an overview of digital visual interfaces, provided by Silicon Image. As I reviewed the headings of the slides, one entry stopped me cold: Conten t Protection Status. Content protection? In a flat panel?? Yup: "Implementation of DVI content protection is suitable for PCs and monitors." [emphasis mine]

Thus began an evening of link clicking and Google searches to find out what this off-handed remark could mean. The slide made mention of the 'CPTWG'. This is the Copy Protection Technical Working Group, a consortium of content providers (movie companies), consumer electronics manufacturers, and players in the IT industry. This is the same group that developed CSS for DVD players.

One paragraph from the above page is particularly disturbing:

CPTWG has focused until now only on "casual piracy [sic]", characterized as what a grandmother can do in her home with her DVD. Piracy [sic] requiring even the level of expertise (and equipment) of her grandson, who might be an EE student, has been excluded from consideration. There is a growing awareness that a broader content protection effort may be necessary.

The most recent meeting of the CPTWG was yesterday, 8 December, 1999. Their meeting announcements may be found here. According to the December meeting announcement, the next meetings will occur on 11 January, 2000, and 9 February, 2000. It costs $100 to attend.

The attendance roster from the November meeting (PDF file, sorry) lists a very interesting, and possibly worrying, mix of organizations. A partial list of representatives included:

• MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America),
• AFMA (American Film Marketing Association),
• Sony Pictures Entertainment,
• Universal Studios,
• Warner Bros.,
• Disney,
• Paramount,
• CEMA (Consumer Electronics Manufacturers Association),
• MEI (parent company to Panasonic), makers of consumer electronics,
• Pioneer, makers of consumer electronics,
• JVC, makers of consumer electronics,
• Philips, makers of consumer electronics and VLSI components (including video encoders),
• Sony, makers of consumer electronics, computers, and displays,
• Toshiba, makers of consumer electronics, computers, flat panels, disk drives, digital cameras, copiers, and laser printers,
• NEC, makers of computers, displays, printers, and telecomm equipment,
• Hewlett Packard, makers of computers, printers, and testing/measuring equipment (oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, etc.),
• Quantum, makers of disk drives,
• IBM, makers of computers, disk drives, and bunches of other stuff,
• Compaq, makers of computers,
• Apple Computer, makers of computers,
• ATI Technologies, makers of PC graphics cards,
• Dolby Labs, creators and licensors of audio enhancement technologies,
• Intel, makers of microprocessors, motherboard controllers, and graphics and peripheral chips,
• Microsoft, software market monopolists,
• Dow Chemical (I have no idea why they're here),
• A number of law firms.

If you download the roster and read closely, you'll see every major piece of your computer represented. There is no doubt that at least one part of your computer -- your CPU, your RAM, your disk drive, your graphics card, your monitor -- is manufactured by one of these companies.

If you look further still, you'll see there are no consumer advocacy groups listed.

What are they all working toward? Quite simply, to prevent you from using your lawfully obtained digital material in any way they don't want.

Here's one example of how they'll do it: If you've visited Fry's or CompUSA recently, you'll notice that full-size flat panel displays are starting to appear. Currently, most of these displays are based on the old VGA analog signals, which are converted into the digital signals needed by the panels. The Digital Display Working Group is working on a new connector and signalling standard called Digital Visual Interface (DVI) that will allow computer displays to go all-digital. You won't need a DAC on the video card; the digital signals will be fed straight through to the display. Image fidelity will be much higher, since there won't be any intervening DAC/ADC conversions. Version 1.0 of the standard has been published and is available for download (PDF format). The DVI spec currently does not stipulate copy protection measures. However, plans are in the works to incorporate it.

Intel is one of the primary contributors to this effort. On Intel's developer site, they have some papers on copy protection for IEEE 1394 (Firewire) digital streams. In two separate articles, 1394-based Digital Content Protection: an Intel Proposal, and Content Protection for IEEE 1394 Serial Buses (the latter being a Powerpoint presentation masquerading as a PDF file), Intel outlines its proposal for protecting digital content over Firewire. By using cryptographic authentication techniques, a device offering digital content will "handshake" with other devices on the bus to assure that digital data is only received by, "compliant devices." In a revised overview of the proposal, IDF Talk: Content Protection for the IEEE 1394 Bus, Intel offers concrete implementation details, including:

• DSS (Digital Signature Standard)
• Diffie-Hellman key exchange for device authentication,
• Blowfish cipher for content encryption, with a keylength of 32-128 bits,
• Digital watermarking techniques to declare "rights" (right to playback, right to copy, etc.) to the receiving device.

The full proposal (currently version 0.91), with lots of technical detail, is mirrored on CPTWG's site (the links to Intel's site don't work).

Intel's proposal also recommends that the copy protection system be field-upgradeable to thwart ongoing attacks, and that it should be possible to revoke (read: disable) a device determined to be "compromised." (The tone of the proposals is also interesting. It's previously been thought that, because of USB, Intel is hostile to IEEE 1394. Yet these proposals suggest that Intel's quite enthusiastic about 1394... Once copy protection is incorporated.)

Intel's proposal mentions only IEEE 1394. However, it also mentions that there's nothing preventing the technique being applied generally to any bi-directional link. So for all occurrences of '1394', substitute 'DVI', and you've got an idea of what to look forward to in your new digital monitor. And your new DVD player. And your new HDTV set. And your new USB speakers.

Intel goes even further in their paper, A Framework for DVD-Audio Content Protection. In it, the author suggests that DVD-Audio recorders permanently remember the IRSC (International Standard Recording Code) of every song the device is asked to copy, so that it may only be copied once, period. They go on to suggest that the recorder could have a modem built-in to authorize (read: purchase) the ability to make additional copies.

In short, through this industry consortium, Hollywood proposes to exert control over every link in the digital chain, from the digital camera, to the disk drive, to the CPU, to the graphics card, to your display. They will decide what rights you have. Even if a court decides Fair Use includes multiple copies for personal use (such as assembling a video montage), it won't matter. Your computer will still refuse to make the copies (and probably fink on you, as well).

This coordinated effort is ostensibly to combat unsanctioned copying (which the industry chronically refers to incorrectly as 'theft' and 'piracy'). However, no one has ever been able to provably quantify the value of unrealized sales due to such copying. All dollar estimates that have been published are just that: estimates, based on idealized extrapolations of what-if scenarios. Moreover, although the industry claims to "lose" billions every year, they continue to post record profits. Finally, despite the proliferation of CDR drives and the Internet, most unrealized sales are the result of organized mass counterfeiting rings, not casual copying. None of the proposed methods I've seen appear to thwart mass counterfeiting at all. So clearly there's some other reason for all this.

The thing that puzzles me most is why the computer and consumer electronics industries haven't told Hollywood to take a hike. Intel's copy protection proposals state, in bold letters, "No content protection = No Hollywood content." This belief is taken as axiomatic by all the players, and appears to be the driving force behind the entire effort. This belief is also false.

Audio on CDs are recorded as plaintext, and the music industry continues to earn rapacious profits. Even the with the advent of CDRs, no music industry executive in his right mind would suggest dropping CD sales and going strictly with cassettes and vinyl. If nothing else, the manufacturing costs for CDs are lower than those for cassettes and vinyl. Likewise, DVDs are tremendously cheaper to produce than videotapes. Videotape duplication is a labor-intensive process; DVDs can be stamped out automatically. The savings in cost-of-goods alone would more than balance against any unrealized sales from casual copying. Corporate shareholders, always mindful of the bottom line, will also demand that the studios move to the cheaper, higher-quality process, copy protected or not.

The fact is that the computer and electronics firms are in the driver's seat, and are free to dictate how the new digital formats will work. Hollywood will use whatever format becomes popular, whether it has copy protection or not. They may grumble about it, but they'll use it. The economics afford them little choice.

We are only now beginning to explore the social and ethical consequences of a Star Trek-like universe where everything can be infinitely duplcated at zero cost. We have no idea where things will end up. But now is not the time to start erecting electronic walls and imposing artificial scarcity. The ignoble and richly-deserved death of DIVX showed -- fairly unequivocally, I thought -- that consumers want to make free, fair use of their digital media, without interference from outside. I believe its death reinforces the future toward which we've been pushing for centuries: Increased abundance at reduced cost.

Nevertheless, the CPTWG and the organizations supporting it are blindly moving forward. It may turn out it's impossible to dam the ocean, but they're gearing up to give it one hell of a try. We can only hope that the lesson of DIVX will be repeated until it is learned.

Schwab

I guess you are meant to think of them like a fine wine or something. To emphasise the point they have a huge image of a bottle of wine (of indeterminate vintage)

I've got this nice '94 HP-UX 9.04 machine. I think I'll lay it down in the server room to mature for a bit longer. See if it becomes more stable.

In my job, I wade through pages and pages of marketing BS every day. A not so nice side-effect is that I can spout it along with the best of them. Describing problems as issues, re-synergising my paradigms to leverage my time-to-value in today's fast moving E-conomy etc etc etc. Someone at HP Marketing at least has a sense of humo(u)r. I wonder if Carly is aware.

My product is vintage
Your product is legacy
His product is obsolete

Here's a technical report on the the great work HP has done on moving Linux to IA-64: http://www.hpl.hp.com/techr eports/1999/HPL-1999-83.html
I submitted this submitted this to /. a while ago but was smacked down by the lame ass editors. The stories have been of unbelievably low quality the last few months.

Homer: Donut?
Lisa: No, thanks. Do you have any fruit?
Homer: [offers some of the donut he's eating]
This has purple stuff inside. Purple is a fruit.

That wouldn't seem logical if this earlier announcement is true.

but wait a couple of years and HP will be buying and reselling Intel IA64 server hardware building blocks like they do now with IA32.

It wouldn't surprise me if the part of HP currently selling high-end IA32 boxes goes this way.

There'll also probably be a short period where the performance of PA-RISC and other current processors overlaps with IA-64 performance

How short do you think this will be? one year or several decades?

My personal opinion is the longer overlap with existing and new processors the better -- competition is good.

Yeah, good luck with linux. and PA-RISC. I bet more people will want your big-iron PA systems than dell's new IA64-systems.

Hope so.

Are you working with Merced (erhh iTanium), proto systems?
-- A bunch or questions you will not answer

Some of my friends are working on IA64 stuff. I've used the IA64 simluator but haven't seen the actual working hardware yet.

Do they have the resources to start a new design now? and if they did when will it be done?

HP corporate press and some analysts (Gartner?) disagree with the death of PA-RISC. If this PR is correct, HP must already be working on at least PA-8700. The .hp.com in my e-mail address means I can't comment further. And even when PA-RISC dies, the ideas aren't completely dead. Does the IA64 instruction set look more like Pentium or PA-RISC?

Seems to me some people will feel comfortable going to IA-64 right away, and some will probably take a while. Just think how many folks are still running really old OSes. There'll also probably be a short period where the performance of PA-RISC and other current processors overlaps with IA-64 performance, just as there is probably some overlap between Pentium and PA-RISC today.

Linux on PA-RISC gives people the option to convert to Linux sooner and/or cheaper, either converting their existing HP boxes or purchasing new ones, and then switch to Linux on IA-64 later -- two small steps instead of one large one. (Some will continue using HP-UX of course)

This sounds like customer choice, which seems like a good idea.

But the best reason for Linux on PA-RISC is that I have fun helping make it happen!

The HP S20 is a pretty decent film scanner that's not terribly expensive. I agree that SLRs are great, just don't make the mistake many people make, which is to get an expensive body and cheap lenses.

All in all, this seems pretty interesting, though HP's What is e-speak page is nothing but meaningless marketing buzz. I'm still very fuzzy on what this thing actually does though from what I understand it's a standard interface to e-commerce vendors and buyers. That sounds nifty, but whatever happened to mail-order? That still works for me....

Yes, there are devices like this that do work. However, there is a device called the HP48GX that is easily programmed, has a large user base, and supports many devices, and can easily learn new ones. The HP48GX can also run a multitude of games and other programs. It can even do trig and calculus.

Oh, yea... its a calculator... But it works and is very cheap. Only $129.

Take a look at HP's site

This is basically comercialisation of the Linux Virtual Server Project... it's a load balancer - much like Cisco's LocalDirector...

Now if you want real clustering, help with the Linux High-Availability Howto or go look at HP/UX's MC/ServiceGuard - or if you are forced to play with toys, MS makes NT Enterprise...

GEEK!

I've been playing with HP's OpenMail today and the little I've done says it's very nice. I haven't gotten to do much with it because I have another very large project that I'm working on. The documentation is very nice, and everything can be administrated from the command line. Unfortunately, I hadn't been able to get the omadmin vt100 client to work (the screenshots look cool :-) although the command line configuration utilities worked fine and all the command names seem very logical.

It will work with outlook (as something like an exchange server) and it comes with a linux client, however it didn't look extremely pretty. What I liked most was the licensing. According to the page, it looks about half the price of an equivalent Exchange setup, however you buy the licenses in bulks of 50.

http://www.ice.hp.com/cyc/om/00/index.ht ml

and

http://www.ice.hp.com/cyc/om/ 00/showfile.cgi?100-1458

I've been playing with HP's OpenMail today and the little I've done says it's very nice. I haven't gotten to do much with it because I have another very large project that I'm working on. The documentation is very nice, and everything can be administrated from the command line. Unfortunately, I hadn't been able to get the omadmin vt100 client to work (the screenshots look cool :-) although the command line configuration utilities worked fine and all the command names seem very logical.

It will work with outlook (as something like an exchange server) and it comes with a linux client, however it didn't look extremely pretty. What I liked most was the licensing. According to the page, it looks about half the price of an equivalent Exchange setup, however you buy the licenses in bulks of 50.

http://www.ice.hp.com/cyc/om/00/index.ht ml

and

http://www.ice.hp.com/cyc/om/ 00/showfile.cgi?100-1458

I've been playing with HP's OpenMail today and the little I've done says it's very nice. I haven't gotten to do much with it because I have another very large project that I'm working on. The documentation is very nice, and everything can be administrated from the command line. Unfortunately, I hadn't been able to get the omadmin vt100 client to work (the screenshots look cool :-) although the command line configuration utilities worked fine and all the command names seem very logical.

It will work with outlook (as something like an exchange server) and it comes with a linux client, however it didn't look extremely pretty. What I liked most was the licensing. According to the page, it looks about half the price of an equivalent Exchange setup, however you buy the licenses in bulks of 50.

http://www.ice.hp.com/cyc/om/00/index.ht ml

and

http://www.ice.hp.com/cyc/om/ 00/showfile.cgi?100-1458

For the collaboration part of the equation, HP's Openmail might be worth checking out. Serves Outlook clients, Linux GUI clients, POP clients, web-based clients. MAPI, LDAP functionality, messaging, calendaring, shared directories, yada yada. Full Release 6.0 for Linux is a free download. We've been playing with it for a couple weeks, seems very functional, proprietary or no.

The Intellimouse Explorer is powered by HP technology. HP Labs profile of the creator of the new optical mouse

I haven't checked up on the port in a few months, but I doubt it's anywhere near as usable as your typical setup. It should pick up steam soon though.

What I would like to tell everyone who has an opportunity to pick up a 9000/7xx machine is to go ahead and do it, because even if it comes with HP-UX 9.xx, you can get an ugprade to HP-UX 10.20 gratis from HP as part of their Y2K program. I "rescued" a 720 from an engineering firm who was "upgrading" to NT and have been happily using it for quite some time now at least as a glorified X terminal for my FreeBSD box. My copy of 10.20 is in the mail. :-) In any event, you can have a very usable system -- and quite possibly learn a bit about other UNIXes (which is a very good thing, IMO) while you wait for the Puffin Group to bring their work to a more usable state.

Grab them while you can! They're really nice boxes.

Wow, I'm not sure we should even reply to the author on this one, it's so bad. My favorite part is at the end where a 'spokesperson' (no name, of course) for HP says that Linux isn't 'robust' enough yet. If that truly is someone who works for HP, I guess they haven't been to their web page lately.

Klingon, esperanto, etc just seem silly. All they can do is borrow words from each language.

This is true of neither Klingon nor Esperanto. Words in Esperanto are largely made by sticking short roots and affixes together. Example: "samdomano" (pron. /sAm doUm 'A noU/, in IPA ASCII notation). You might be able to recognize the roots "sam" = same or "dom" = house, but I'd be very surprised to learn that the word as a whole resembles the word for "housemate" in any natural language.

As for Klingon, the whole idea is that it's supposed to be unrelated to Earth languages! If they're borrowing words from existing natural languages, they've done a very poor job of the whole thing.

Also, aparently there was a vote in the working group yesterday (Oct. 12), to send the final spec to IEEE for general balloting. Hmmmmm any coincidendce that Intel announced the usb2.0 spec on the same day that vote in working group happened?

From HP's site: 1394-A (also known as Firewire) is the IEEE designation for a standard high performance serial bus. The 1394-A bus supports data rates of 100, 200 and 400 Mbits/sec, the 1394-B can support from 800 to 3200 Mbits/sec. Like USB, 1394 enables plug-and-play peripheral connectivity, provides power to peripherals (thereby eliminating the need for each peripheral to have its own power supply), and supports isochronous data transfers.
http://www.hp.com/desktops/library /glossary.html (page last modified Monday Aug. 16).

-Just another AC

I think it's important to realize what Tim's point is here: that Linux versus Windows versus anybody else isn't the point here. It's all about building an open platform upon which to deploy the next generation of Internet applications.

In ten years, desktop operating systems will be an endangered species. We won't care about GNOME versus KDE, or even Linux versus Windows. We'll be far too busy connecting to the universal information applications with wireless appliances, handhelds, and other "pervasive" forms of computing. Everybody's going to have a different "net widget" in their hands or on their desks. We're already seeing this today -- can't everyone use the Web regardless of whether they use Linux, Windows, or an iMac?

The question is this: In such a heterogeneous computing landscape, how can we deploy services which are universally accessible?

Tim's point is a very good one: That we sure can't get there if everything's closed and proprietary. We need an open platform on which to base the next generation of networked information access. Windows ain't gonna do it. Linux (alone) ain't gonna do it, either. So it's important to chart out the space of platforms which will support the new applications. And Open Source is a fantastic way to ensure that the platform remains open itself.

For those who don't believe it, go read up on some technologies like Jini, Ninja, and e-Speak. The wave is coming.

Matt Welsh

Anyways, since HP had a hand in with Intel in designing the Merced, will it also be able to emulate PA-RISC based software in addition to x86 software?

Not by itself; the code would be translated to IA-64 code by software. This part of HP's versionof the IA-64 Application Instruction Set Architecture Guide says:

Binary compatibility between PA-RISC and IA-64 is handled through dynamic object code translation. This process is very efficient because there is such a high degree of correspondence between PA-RISC and IA-64 instructions. HP's performance studies show that on average the dynamic translator only spends 1-2% of its time in translation with 98-99% of the time spent executing native code. The dynamic translator actually performs optimizations on the translated code to take advantage of IA-64's wider instructions, and performance features such as predication, speculation and large register sets. In addition, if an application has been aggressively optimized for PA-RISC, some of the benefit of the optimizations will carry over to IA-64. In fact, an aggressively optimized PA-RISC application may actually perform faster on IA-64 using the dynamic translator than the same application recompiled at a low level of optimization on an IA-64 compiler. Of course, the best performance will result from a high level of optimization using a good native compiler.

The dynamic translator is designed to run all non-kernel intrusive code, handling both 64-bit and 32-bit instructions. This means operating systems and device drivers typically would not be supported, but all other applications will run. HP's dynamic translator will be bundled with all versions of HP-UX sold for IA-64 systems. When HP-UX encounters code compiled for PA-RISC, it will automatically and transparently invoke the dynamic translator which will allow the code to run on IA-64 without any intervention. Correctness of the dynamic translator has been verified with the same testing regimen used to validate PA-RISC processors.

If I remember correctly, HP used binary-to-binary translation to move code for the stack-based 16-bit HP 3000 machines to the PA-RISC-based 32-bit HP 3000 machines, so they've done this before.

If you think that would be cool, go check out Hewlett Packard's new Jornada 430se at http://www.hp.com/jornada/pr oducts/430se/overview.html. The technology's already out on the market.
Disclaimer:I contract to HP, and have no qualms about pimping their really cool stuff. :)
Geek-grrl in training
"I haven't lost my mind, it's backed up on tape somewhere."

Referring to a single person of unknown gender as "they" is common slang but is not correct english. "They" is always plural when used correctly.

Many people argue that anything used widely enough becomes correct. This is true but I don't like it (although I don't have time to learn Latin... :-)

From a practical standpoint, using "they" as singular makes a correctly singular noun sound incorrect, e.g. "Everyone was blowing their nose" vs. "Everyone was blowing their noses" - borrowed from the alt.english.usage FAQ. "Everyone" is singular, requiring the singular "nose", but "their nose" sounds strange...

For information than you ever wanted on the topic of gender-neutral pronouns, see The Gender Neutral Pronoun FAQ.

Hmm.. I just tried the game.. Seems like the link is wrong.. It points to http://chem.external.hp.com/cag/products/game_inde x_1.htm, which just seems to be an image.. The game is at http://chem.external.hp.com /cag/products/game_index.htm..

Please notice that you should read HP:s terms of usage before accessing the webpage mentioned on the article above. At least I really hate these webpages or other services that say you comply their terms of access by using their service, so you don't have any chance to know their policy before you have already accepted it.