Slashdot Mirror

Erbo writes "No, that's not a misprint--Hewlett-Packard is now giving its most powerful hardware away. But there's a catch, of course...they'll be wanting "a piece of the action" in return. Could this be the next step after the "free PC" business model? Will it carry HP by leaps and bounds into the 21st century? ZDnet has the details. "

jmcmurry writes " This page says that HP Education will start offering Linux courses in June. They'll use RedHat 5.2 in the lab but will cover other distributions as well. Later courses will include "a transition course for Windows NT administrators." "

Finally a chance to break in my cheesy little "Quickies" icon *grin*. First up is Miguel "Mr GNOME" de Icaza who wrote in to point us at Open Resources which looks like a pretty nice site. NiceGuy wrote in to say that Propaganda 6 is out if you happen to be sick of your desktop- some of the finest textures I've seen yet. Rob Biggs wrote in to say that Transmetta has opened up their website. *cough*. Aurik sent us linkage to some geek toys like a plasma fire saber and mass drivers and rail guns Jowey wrote in to say that ReBoot has been bought by the cartoon network and will be re-aired. Now I gotta get a dish. broken sent us a link to the Pig Dance. Is anyone else really sick of these? Brian Fair sent us linkage to a sticker that I guess you could put on your big truck if you have one. Those things amuse me. I've seen them with Ford Logos and stuff, I guess it was only a matter of time. Ah well, thats it for me. I'm gonna wail on some badly tuned power chords, watch Futurama and just take it easy for a bit.

ChrisMul writes "We just heard the announcement over the company wide speaker system. Hewlett-Packard IS splitting into two companies. One will be a "Testing and Measurements" company who's name has yet to be chosen, and the other will be the computing division, which will keep the "HP" name. This is going to happen as they company also chooses a new CEO...time to find a new job... "

Lumpish Scholar writes "Rather than only enhance their proprietary debugger(s), Hewlett-Packard has started distributing "wdb" ("Wildebeest"), an enhanced (and still free / Open Source, naturally) version of the GNU debugger that supports HP's C, C++, and Fortran compilers under HP-UX. They're not just giving it away; they're supporting it for their customers with compiler support. "

Drew Bertola writes "HP World Conference is looking for paper submissions for their Linux Track. The Linux Track may be cancelled unless 4 more paper submissions are made by the end of the week. To submit your idea, go to the HP World Conference submissions page. For more information, e-mail Orly Larson or me. "

A number of you wrote to let us know that Hewlett-Packard will be supporting Red Hat Linux. This support comes from their Firehunter product. Firehunter is HP's version of Internet service-management solutions, and is targeted for the ISP community. They will be supporting Red Hat, in addition to their prior support of Solaris and NT. It's good to see this-although this does seem like a natural place for this to take place.

ockman@penguincomputing.com writes "It looks like IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Compaq have decided to get back in the game of adding real value. They have a PCI spec. [Ed's note - will have] that's six times faster than the current one. This was created without the support of Intel, as what these companies call "a grass-roots type of backlash" Sounds like good news - either Intel supports the superior technology and competes with Mylex and the gang, or loses market share. Besides, it looks as if Intel will support it anyway. More MHz never hurt anybody (no pun intended).

John Cavanaugh writes "Well after numerous delays it looks like the StarOffice website is finally up. link They have quite a bit of information available on StarOffice 5, which by the way looks very cool. It appears that desktop applications are really beginning to catch some momentum." Mmmmm. Apps good.

Called into action by the possibility of the DOJ and the states working on an anti-trust action together, tech giants ranging from Dell, HP and Intel (surprise!) have gotten together to encourage the government not to block the release of Windows 98.

Kirk Mitchener writes "HP's E-Business magazine posted an article on current quantum computing technologies and future possibilities. Very interesting article. "

The U.S Department of Energy will launch a project called "Pathforward" this month. The project aims to build a 30 terraflop supercomputer by the year 2001. The U.S DOE will buy 2 IBM PowerPC-based supercomputers with 4096 processors in late '98 or early '99 and will buy a second 3 terraflop based computer from Cray Research Inc. later that year.

Hewlett-Packard is the main contractor in charge of designing externalconnect links so that the computers may be clustered efficiently (more than 6.4GB/sec, minimal latency)

When do I get one? =)