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Here is a laptop that might be up your alley http://www.shopping.hp.com/webapp/shopping/load_configuration.do?destination=review&config_id=7207413#a AMD A8-3550MX processor, 1 GB Radeon HD 7690M discrete graphics, 16 GB of DDR3 RAM, 160 GB SSD, 1920x1080 Anti-glare LED screen, Grand Total 1579.99

Go to hp.com and navigate to the Support and Drivers section and then to Drivers and Software section. Search for your printer product number. You would be presented with a page that lists all the available downloads for your printer. Look for the section Driver. If you are lucky (like this page), the download under this section should be in 10-30 MB range. If so, it includes just the driver and nothing else (no installer etc). You will have to manually initiate installation of your printer and point to this package when prompted for the driver files.

In case you are not so lucky (like this page), there will be no option to download a driver only package. Instead, you will have to download the full software. Nevertheless, it should not be difficult to locate the actual driver in this package by searching for .INF files. After that, just manually initiate installation of the printer.

I don't know how much the concept of universal drivers has caught on, but HP provides drivers which can print to a variety of different physical printer devices. So, instead of downloading a different driver each for your different printers, you just install one HP Universal Printer Driver. This driver can print to all of your printers. It reduces maintenance effort since you need to update only 1 driver. Universal drivers are especially useful in office environments.

I am not sure where the drivers marked "IT professionals only" come from.

Go to hp.com and navigate to the Support and Drivers section and then to Drivers and Software section. Search for your printer product number. You would be presented with a page that lists all the available downloads for your printer. Look for the section Driver. If you are lucky (like this page), the download under this section should be in 10-30 MB range. If so, it includes just the driver and nothing else (no installer etc). You will have to manually initiate installation of your printer and point to this package when prompted for the driver files.

In case you are not so lucky (like this page), there will be no option to download a driver only package. Instead, you will have to download the full software. Nevertheless, it should not be difficult to locate the actual driver in this package by searching for .INF files. After that, just manually initiate installation of the printer.

I don't know how much the concept of universal drivers has caught on, but HP provides drivers which can print to a variety of different physical printer devices. So, instead of downloading a different driver each for your different printers, you just install one HP Universal Printer Driver. This driver can print to all of your printers. It reduces maintenance effort since you need to update only 1 driver. Universal drivers are especially useful in office environments.

I am not sure where the drivers marked "IT professionals only" come from.

"You've got to be kidding me."

Your right. I'm kidding you. The people who switched to Linux made the switch because they love the ease of use of Windows, and the fact that it never gave them any problems or changed the user interface across versions, and nothing ever broke as the result of an update. When they want a new software package they far prefer hunting around on the internet for some application that may or may not be malware to using tested code from signed repositories. They especially miss the experience of clicking on the link that is supposed to bring them to their goal, only to find that they have been tricked into going to a download page for some other product. The few who did move are constantly lamenting about the good ole' days when they had to ignore attachments in emails because opening them could infect their computer.

"Second, yes, people buy new hardware devices, replace broken hardware, or drivers that used to work will stop working on an update."

... at which point they do what every user should do. They consult a qualified professional before they buy the hardware and get quality devices that work immediately when installed with no need to reconfigure anything, or they get help re-configuring things in the very rare case that it is required.

To hear you tell it needing new software and replacing hardware components is such a regular occurance that nobody could ever consult a qualified individual before doing it and enlist their help when necessary.

The HP Elitebooks are rock solid high-end laptops. The workstation elitebooks http://shopping1.hp.com/is-bin/INTERSHOP.enfinity/WFS/WW-USSMBPublicStore-Site/en_US/-/USD/ViewStandardCatalog-Browse?CatalogCategoryID=vfoQ7EN5XpgAAAEuPyFCFgH7 include numeric keypads.

Ticketmaster is still VAX VMS.

Here is a VAX still on the HP web site, and of course OpenVMS.

Ticketmaster is still VAX VMS.

Here is a VAX still on the HP web site, and of course OpenVMS.

They are cheap if you go refurb.
Cheetahdeals has Gateways and Dells cheap.
Specs on the cheapest one($400) completely blow away any tablet.
The Gateway One ZX4951-33e Refurbished All-In-One PC's 21.5" Full HD display saves space, is easy to use and is perfect for any room in your home providing interactive computing, enhanced media sharing with social networks and stunning HD entertainment.
        Intel Core i3-550 3.20GHz
        Genuine Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
        Intel HD Graphics
        4GB DDR3 and 1TB HDD
        21.5-inch HD widescreen touchscreen display
        Wireless Keyboard and Mouse
http://www.cheetahdeals.com/All-In-One-s/35.htm

Or HP's refurbs often has good prices on TouchSmarts. They don't now, but stock changes all the time.
http://h71016.www7.hp.com/html/hpremarketing/daily.asp

As the article states, this is already a non-issue for some companies, as they can simply offer Windows apps over Citrix. My client is already well set up to serve apps over Citrix, as it is a lot easier to distribute them to a small user group than to have to build an installer that will run on the locked-down Windows workstation. Switching to Linux in this ecosystem would be a relatively minor step.

Funny enough, that client has recently done the opposite: swap out some of the extreme high-end Linux workstations that some users needed, moving them into the datacenter, and letting those users access them through a virtual desktop on a standard company craptop. Strangely, almost all of those users are rather pleased with this arrangement, since they can still do the high-power computing they need, from a machine that has all the standard tools (Office, etc.) that the rest of the company uses.

By the way, virtual desktops have come a long way since Citrix, and there's no reason why you could not run Photoshop on them. I messed around with RGS from HP, which is capable of giving you a virtual desktop spanning several physical screens, and easily handles video, audio, 3D... we even tried Unreal Tournament on it, which worked well.

I believe HP phased out the 1920x1200 with the 8540w - it's only 1080 tall now:
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?objectID=c02030608&lang=en&cc=us&taskId=&prodSeriesId=4096175&prodTypeId=321957

As a tablet or smartphone UI, actually it's pretty good. I still prefer Android, but I can understand why people would like Metro. A lot of the texting, e-mail, etc. widgets that people use on Android would not be necessary on Metro, because of the way it presents the tile for an app. (basically, no icons, everything is a widget).

As a desktop UI, you have to ask what the hell they were smoking. Something designed for touchscreen input on a 4" device does *not* scale to a 24" screen with a keyboard/mouse. While it's usable, it would be very counter-productive to anybody who's comfortable with the mouse, because they would have to scroll through pages of tiles to find the one they want. I don't think it's going to be the unmitigated disaster that everybody says it's going to be, but I do think that "how to turn Metro off" will replace porn as the number 1 Google search for a while after it launches.

While I agree that contextually it doesn't work well with a mouse, on something like this it does make some sense. Perhaps someone at Microsoft thinks the mouse is a dead end UI wise?

This could be something that points to the fact that they think that Surface will start to make some inroads at some point as well. Metro makes some sense for it in the same manner it does for the HP piece above, and all the tablet stuff.

This then introduces the idea that Microsoft is embracing the tablet as the desktop replacement, which leads down to a whole different list of interesting conversations.

I have had tapes become corrupted during the writing process, during a recovery process, and who knows about those tapes that have been stored offsite for 5-10 years.

And you didn't even mention what happens when one of those single reel LTO tapes snaps or tangles inside your $2000 drive.

The old HP lasers were tanks. There are still many of them in use today. I have an LJ1100 under my desk currently. Have to run it off a network print server now since my new computer doesn't have a parallel port. Ya, it's ancient but it doesn't do stupid crap like a large number of the new HP's. At some point HP when to from a logic in the printer to a logic in the driver model, and everything went downhill from there. A few customers of mine have relitively new HP LaserJets that are useless because they crash when you attempt to print pdf files. HP has known about the problem, but since the printers are not the newest line.

http://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Other-Printing-Questions/HP-LaserJet-1020-1022-Kills-Print-Spooler/td-p/29771

There are tons of other issues with the newer stuff like that :(

Oh never buy an HP inkjet. Man they seem to suck. The 6000-8000 series office all in ones, I've never heard such loud, slow to start printing, driver crash prone pieces in my life, And they die young too.

I've been a happy consumer of HP's elitebook laptops for some time now. They have far better build-quality (Mil-spec) than Macbook Pros, are certified to run linux, can be ordered without Windows, and are extremely easy to open up to swap components out, as well as being far better value.

And now I see that they are bringing out an all-in-one desktop machine specifically designed to be easy to customise, totally tool-free.

Having a preference for the OS is the only objective reason to go Mac. Everything else is hype inflated by their astronomical advertising budget.

While I of course don't shortchange folks like that I do put any new build in a flashy case simply because it makes them sell MUCH quicker if there is some bling bling so it really wouldn't be hard for HP to make an "Elite PC" line with some flash and get in the consumers.

Not 1337 PCs. Elite PCs.

"Elite" is a brand name HP already uses for desktop PCs and notebooks for businesses. They're not all that flashy.

While I of course don't shortchange folks like that I do put any new build in a flashy case simply because it makes them sell MUCH quicker if there is some bling bling so it really wouldn't be hard for HP to make an "Elite PC" line with some flash and get in the consumers.

Not 1337 PCs. Elite PCs.

"Elite" is a brand name HP already uses for desktop PCs and notebooks for businesses. They're not all that flashy.

Yeah, the high-end E7's aren't cheap compared to an industry standard dual-socket box. Compared to a mainframe though - oh, yeah youbetcha. Industry Standard Servers go up to 8 sockets with 80 cores and 160 threads, but the 8-socket box is so rare that I don't recommend it without good reason. You can wind up being the beta tester for the OEM, it doesn't have a max RAM advantage, the CPUs are slow, it's huge and burns power, and so on. Maybe the next version will be more sexy.

Let me take a moment for disclaimer and say that I don't work for HP, nor FusionIO, nor Intel, nor anybody else mentioned here. I work in this space as an enterprise architect, but that's not a claim to authority on the subject but a basis for the disclaimers that follow. I know some things about this stuff and am having a personal discussion about these issues unrelated to my work. HP, Dell, IBM, Fujitsu and others offer equivalent solutions to the specific industry standard server architectures mentioned here (or they wouldn't be Industry Standard) and HP systems are only referenced for convenience of the specification links I have to hand. AMD has impressive solutions in this space and I'm fond of those too. There are various available brands of PCIe attached Flash storage with varying performance and reliability metrics, and the referenced FusionIO devices are only specific examples with published performance that can be measured in the field - of many. In this discussion space my opinion is not my employer's opinion and they neither know I do nor encourage me to comment here. This is not a specific recommendation or solution to any specific need, which I would only do under contract with specific terms for performance and pay. I don't own any stock in any of these companies either. This is not a solicitation for employment - I'm good, thanks. Finally, I've taken careful measures to shield my real person from my /. persona these last 7 years for good reason, and this is one - though it's not so hard to find me if you try given the evolution of Google my efforts in this regard provide plausible deniability. I try to be an anonymous commenter and you should not trust me. Validate everything yourself if you've found what I've said interesting or promising enough to do so. End disclaimer. Whew.

You can get a dual socket X5690 box like the HP DL370 G6 and stuff up to eight of the FusionIO cards in it too if you want and maybe still get your 2M IOPS in 5U. Those only go up to 384GB of RAM each these days and 12 cores/24 threads at a nominal 3.4GHz of x64 performance. It depends on what you want to do, where your price/performance/reliability points are, whether the box is strictly a data cruncher or a VMHost too. The E7 box can be a much better deal if you calculate the cost of the rack space pretty high - especially if you only need 512GB of RAM because you can use the price sweet-spot 8GB DIMMS. If your RAM needs are even more modest then the 2 socket box becomes the better deal at 144GB RAM with the 8GB DIMMS. You can't go any lower than that and have a general-purpose data-crunching box, as those FusionIO card drivers require immense buffers. Just one of these least boxes would be more than adequate to handle, for example, peak Twitter at the current rate of growth including acceleration for the next three years including the storage requirements for every tweet ever (though of course, geographic redundancy, geographic latency, and so on...).

Price of the processors and RAM is a fairly big deal in the processing part. Those E7's and 32GB DIMMS are spendy parts. If you can crunch the problem down to chunks of 96-144GB and 512K IOPS you get the best deal - and you can move to 2U servers or blades and put a lot of them (64!) in one rack. That's great if your job requires a lot

Yeah, the high-end E7's aren't cheap compared to an industry standard dual-socket box. Compared to a mainframe though - oh, yeah youbetcha. Industry Standard Servers go up to 8 sockets with 80 cores and 160 threads, but the 8-socket box is so rare that I don't recommend it without good reason. You can wind up being the beta tester for the OEM, it doesn't have a max RAM advantage, the CPUs are slow, it's huge and burns power, and so on. Maybe the next version will be more sexy.

Let me take a moment for disclaimer and say that I don't work for HP, nor FusionIO, nor Intel, nor anybody else mentioned here. I work in this space as an enterprise architect, but that's not a claim to authority on the subject but a basis for the disclaimers that follow. I know some things about this stuff and am having a personal discussion about these issues unrelated to my work. HP, Dell, IBM, Fujitsu and others offer equivalent solutions to the specific industry standard server architectures mentioned here (or they wouldn't be Industry Standard) and HP systems are only referenced for convenience of the specification links I have to hand. AMD has impressive solutions in this space and I'm fond of those too. There are various available brands of PCIe attached Flash storage with varying performance and reliability metrics, and the referenced FusionIO devices are only specific examples with published performance that can be measured in the field - of many. In this discussion space my opinion is not my employer's opinion and they neither know I do nor encourage me to comment here. This is not a specific recommendation or solution to any specific need, which I would only do under contract with specific terms for performance and pay. I don't own any stock in any of these companies either. This is not a solicitation for employment - I'm good, thanks. Finally, I've taken careful measures to shield my real person from my /. persona these last 7 years for good reason, and this is one - though it's not so hard to find me if you try given the evolution of Google my efforts in this regard provide plausible deniability. I try to be an anonymous commenter and you should not trust me. Validate everything yourself if you've found what I've said interesting or promising enough to do so. End disclaimer. Whew.

You can get a dual socket X5690 box like the HP DL370 G6 and stuff up to eight of the FusionIO cards in it too if you want and maybe still get your 2M IOPS in 5U. Those only go up to 384GB of RAM each these days and 12 cores/24 threads at a nominal 3.4GHz of x64 performance. It depends on what you want to do, where your price/performance/reliability points are, whether the box is strictly a data cruncher or a VMHost too. The E7 box can be a much better deal if you calculate the cost of the rack space pretty high - especially if you only need 512GB of RAM because you can use the price sweet-spot 8GB DIMMS. If your RAM needs are even more modest then the 2 socket box becomes the better deal at 144GB RAM with the 8GB DIMMS. You can't go any lower than that and have a general-purpose data-crunching box, as those FusionIO card drivers require immense buffers. Just one of these least boxes would be more than adequate to handle, for example, peak Twitter at the current rate of growth including acceleration for the next three years including the storage requirements for every tweet ever (though of course, geographic redundancy, geographic latency, and so on...).

Price of the processors and RAM is a fairly big deal in the processing part. Those E7's and 32GB DIMMS are spendy parts. If you can crunch the problem down to chunks of 96-144GB and 512K IOPS you get the best deal - and you can move to 2U servers or blades and put a lot of them (64!) in one rack. That's great if your job requires a lot

No, I do believe that's 2TB of directly addressable RAM as one contiguous chunk in one 4U server like the HP DL580 G7 for example, and 1M IOPS consisting of four devices in one server each capable of 250K 512 byte IOPS, and striping in software to deliver the full 1M IOPS in one server. Specifically for storage the IODrive Duo SLC. You can actually do 2M IOPS in that box with 8 devices, but that seems overkill for most things. There's esoteric stuff out there that uplifts this stuff to 20x even that, but uses flash storage as a sort-of second tier of RAM and it's too experimental to consider for enterprise use - and the box becomes a storage only node rather than a general purpose device. You can do some more traditional SFF SSD storage as well if you like, for a second tier of storage. They're doing memory mapping stuff with Infiniband too now I understand, but I didn't figure that either.

This is commercial, off-the-shelf stuff now. Clustering would give you multiples of this naturally, but not linearly and with the concerns that you mention. The next generation of servers is due out any day and will use Load Reduction DIMMs and PCIe 3 to double up both the installable memory and the storage I/O potentials. Industry standard servers are getting pretty hardcore.

Well then that is a clear anti-trust violation. The vendors are running high risk here of having huge fines for doing this. Because there is a separate license in the box that is completely separate from the initial contract of sale... then these are two separate products. To clearly state that they will not offer a refund for the operating system they are:

Conditioning the sale of one product on the condition to buy another. This is widely considered to be an illegal business practice.

Here is what HP says about selling a PC and software as separate products (separate licenses) and then selling them as one bundle:
Red flags: Potential violations of antitrust and fair competition laws
"Agreements with customers, business partners, or suppliers that establish the resale price of a product or service, limit a customer’s right to sell a product, or condition the sale of a product or service on an agreement to buy other products or services."

source: http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/globalcitizenship/csr/sbcbrochure.pdf

So I highly doubt that for one, Hewlett Packard would dare to force a consumer to buy their PC with a separate operating system bundled as one without the option to return one of them. As this would violate what they write into their own business ethics document.

Perhaps what u r referring to is the "fake" windows 7 operating system I have seen bundled with some Netbook PC's. This operating system is highly limited in that for example: the user cannot even change the background image on the desktop. I looked into this and Microsoft wants you (the consumer) to pay extra just to get a real operating system on the box. In these cases, I suspect that Microsoft is not charging anything to the netbook vendors in order to put this software on the PC. In this case, there may be no refund available as no amount was charged by microsoft. I dont know... but I just think u r probably wrong and that refunds are being offered when the operating system is bundled with a PC.

Good point. I was basing my argument off the fact that Sony offers a "no crapware option" for $50, and ostensibly large OEMs like Dell can buy a license for less than $50.

As an individual I can buy a Windows 7 Professional 64 OEM license from Newegg for $100. I sincerely doubt that HP is paying the same price I am. I looked at configuring an Elitebook and when you select FreeDos, it also tells you to select a different warranty. It seems like this is the document you get, which basically says you get no software support for the OS, no drivers, no hardware specific features, and there's no guarantee anything will work.

So it seems like they're refunding you support and development costs. Which I guess you could argue is a Microsoft Tax... but then again should I get a refund on any part of a product I don't like? Am I paying a synaptics tax because I have a wireless mouse I use instead? Personally I say take it or leave it. Don't like that the laptop comes with Windows? Buy something else that doesn't.

Nobody will probably ever read this comment, but I just need to get this out there. The idea you had is certainly interesting, and has probably been had by many people, but I don't think it can ever really have a significant impact, and this is why. If only a few of the richest people/corporations throw their money behind something, you would need an impossibly large portion of the population to oppose it to have any hope of balancing out the numbers. This is why I think the notion of allowing any kind of financial contribution in politics, beyond a tiny amount per individual that a significant portion of the population should be able to afford (e.g. $100), is deeply flawed in a mathematical sense.

There may be rare exceptions to this -- your idea might be effective if for example there is no corporate interest on certain topic, and the few thousand $ you raise happens to catch someone's attention enough to make it worth for them to bother spending any amount of time on it, but I think you'll agree that this is pretty rare. Another instance would be if there really is immense popular support for one side of an issue that can actually counterbalance the corporate opposition, but at those levels of popular support I think it really isn't a matter of money anymore, i.e. any reasonable politician would be more worried about public perception at that point than about campaign funding or whatnot.

Because there are zillions more obvious stuff than nonobvious stuff. So if he's a smart person busy working on lots of nonobvious stuff and patenting some of it, he might not have time to patent the obvious stuff.

Isn't even that obvious to you? I guess nowadays the level of stupidity is so high that most people don't find obvious things obvious anymore.

You think the people who came up with this: http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Lucy_Cherkasova/projects/gdfs.html
wouldn't be able to _easily_[1] come up with Google's algorithm if they were ever hired by a search engine company and had a similar problem to solve?
[1] easy = takes them a day or two to think of the rough idea. Do you really want to award a government granted monopoly on a method of doing things for two decades just because some bright spark needs to take a few days to figure it out? Unless that bright spark is the ultimate genius you are doing the other bright sparks in the world a disfavour if they ever need to solve the problem- because now the problem doesn't take 3 days to solve, it takes weeks or months to negotiate a license/settlement. So tell me how this actually results in net progress?

We might see ARM on servers but it would have to be specialty hardware to keep it from getting anywhere near what's considered a PC.

It's here. Limited availability and high price as yet.

You mean like one of these: HP EliteBook 2760p Tablet PC OR ThinkPad X200t Tablet OR Dell Latitude XT3 Tablet PC ??

All of these currently available, but they sell in really low volumes. Don't know why... I have been using a tabletpc since last 5 years due to my RSI/CTS and the convenience it offers without taking away from the laptop features. But somehow these never took off though there is some demand from niche areas. Probably, there are much less content creation people and much more content consumers than we think.

I never could find any use for the Android/iOS/WebOS tablets except the occasional need to browse the net while watching TV or while waiting/commuting etc - maybe 10-20 min a day max. Even my kids ignore the ipad lying at home - But tablets selling in millions while tabletpc languish in the low '000 !

And current tabletpc models are quite light and with great battery life - so that isn't the reason. Only thing i can see is that there's no app market to waste time with newer and newer games on these.

I never got that strategy of releasing a gazillion products all the time in the first place, not for any device. Why does Sony release 100's of more-or-less the same televisions? HP right now has 89 printers on sale, and those are only the current models. You see the same thing with virtually every tech company.

As far as I can see, all it accomplishes is a support nightmare. Why doesn't Dell just sell 3 great laptops, 3 great servers and 3 great desktops? Wouldn't that result in both better products and less costs? It seems like only Apple and the car industry follow the approach of limiting their product range. All other companies seem to think it's better to have a huge collection of only marginally different products in their catalogue. Very strange in my opinion.

Sorry, your product is not supported in the Microsoft Windows Vista Operating System. For more information of upgrade programs and new product information, please go to the HP Trade-In/Trade-Up Website, or HP Shopping. We are sorry to inform you there will not be any Windows Vista operating system printer drivers available for your product. If you are using the new Windows Vista operating system on your PC, consider an upgrade to a newer HP product that will work with Microsoft’s new Vista operating system. To help you choose a new product upgrade, the following tool will be helpful: http://www.hp.com/support/hho/productreplacement For more information on HP’s Trade-in-Trade-up program: http://www.hp.com/united-states/tradein/home_flash.html Click here to see a full list of HP LaserJet and Color LaserJet products that are supported in Windows Vista.

Thank you, HP.

Sorry, your product is not supported in the Microsoft Windows Vista Operating System. For more information of upgrade programs and new product information, please go to the HP Trade-In/Trade-Up Website, or HP Shopping. We are sorry to inform you there will not be any Windows Vista operating system printer drivers available for your product. If you are using the new Windows Vista operating system on your PC, consider an upgrade to a newer HP product that will work with Microsoft’s new Vista operating system. To help you choose a new product upgrade, the following tool will be helpful: http://www.hp.com/support/hho/productreplacement For more information on HP’s Trade-in-Trade-up program: http://www.hp.com/united-states/tradein/home_flash.html Click here to see a full list of HP LaserJet and Color LaserJet products that are supported in Windows Vista.

Thank you, HP.

For a slightly more sane solution than rackmounting at home, consider the HP microserver.
Very low power (12W CPU), small, quiet, cheap, server grade, no Windows tax, holds four pluggable 3.5" drives plus optical (which some people swap for a 5th HDD for RAID5.)

http://blog.thestateofme.com/2011/05/14/review-hp-microserver/
http://www.silentpcreview.com/HP_Proliant_MicroServer
http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF05a/15351-15351-4237916-4237918-4237917-4248009.html
http://forums.overclockers.com.au/showthread.php?t=905262

If 8TB is full, you need to stop the obsessive collection of warez/pr0n/torrentz you are never likely to watch again.

HP are pretty good with this kind of information now, too (and not just for laptops). There's a wealth of information and videos in their 'Customer Self Repair' section online here: http://h20464.www2.hp.com/index.html

Well with WebOS they'd have a solid API they could use for generations of printers without a lot of porting and compatibility issues. In fact they are already trying to come out with "Print Apps", I'm sure they'd like to have those on the printer itself: http://h50146.www5.hp.com/products/printers/inkjet/print_apps/ Add to that the ability to update the software and probably a variety of wireless integration features and you have what would basically be an all in one printing solution for people who can't deal with a computer (and in Japan there are a LOT of old people).

Pah. I've always known that HP had utter crap for firmware. Last place I worked had an HP color laserjet which, when you tried to print a document with lots of images, would usually crash and require a hard reset. The fucking thing took at least 5 minutes to warm up, too.

The error code it listed, when the HP website was consulted, was something to the effect of "we don't know what the fuck went wrong, so you're basically screwed". The suggested tricks to remedy it (I shit you not) were along the lines of "re-scan all the images in the document, try printing again"... "re-compress the images in the document using lower JPEG quality or different format (GIF, TIFF), try printing again"... "reduce the file size of the print job, try printing again"... "copy-and-paste the entire document into a blank document, try printing again"... "use a different application, try printing again"... "nudge an image in the document slightly up/down/left/right, try printing again"... "add graphics to the document, try printing again"... holy fuck, it's like, are they really this clueless? Yes, they certainly were. Memory corruption? Bad escaping of binary data? Who the fuck knows... all I knew was it was a fucking pain in the ass when I was trying to get 50 copies of a color publication printed, collated, and stapled at 11 PM on Friday night and I needed them done by 8:00 Saturday morning.

So they come up with this crazy VLIW idea

Who's "they"? Intel, or HP?

and realize it will cost a ton of money.

Which, as I understand it, is why HP partnered with Intel (not the other way around).

At the same time, they can convince HP to transition away from their existing RISC architectures (PA-RISC

Which, as I understand it, was HP's intent even before they got Intel involved.

and Alpha)

Which was, at the time the HP-Intel partnership was announced, DEC's RISC architecture - DEC hadn't even been bought by Compaq yet, much less Compaq bought by HP.

I think you're confusing actual power draw with TDP. So for example, an A8-3500M has a 35W TDP, that's the most it will draw for a sustained period of time. The actual power draw at idle will be more in the neighborhood of maybe 10-20W, something like that. So you take that, you add the screen, the hard drive, memory, wireless, etc. and you get your 50W. The CPU is not the dominant factor. In most cases the screen uses more.

Incidentally, Llano has lower idle power consumption than Core i3.

So as for this:

I'm not sure I've seen a single AMD laptop (that isn't based on the E-350) with battery life over 4 hours.

Here you go. AMD A6, "9-cell (100 WHr): Up to 12 hours and 30 minutes."

Bullshit, enterprise class drives have from 1/2 to 1/3rd the AFR of consumer drives. Data from Google, Microsoft, and other large scale providers proves this out. NL SATA is about 2/3rds the AFR of common SATA according to Microsofts numbers from the hosted Exchange for education group.

I believe you are the one spouting BS. Please cite a reference for this. The Google paper clearly says they are using consumer grade drives and not enterprise grade drives. http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/labs.google.com/en/us/papers/disk_failures.pdf

The Microsoft study you referred to says that consumer class disks were not failing any faster than enterprise disks. http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2011/01/07/robert-s-rules-of-exchange-storage-planning-and-testing.aspx http://h20195.www2.hp.com/V2/GetPDF.aspx/4AA2-1309ENW.pdf

Let's count - they have Xeon/Opteron, Itanium, and among their dead platforms, they have PA-RISC, Alpha (DEC/Compaq) and MIPS (Tandem/Compaq). What made them pick this for servers?

You can already add ARM to the mix. Their current crop of low power thin clients are ARM based:
http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF05a/12454-12454-321959-338927-3640405-4063703.html (Wow, nice memorable URL!)

What I wonder is what the differences are between the PA-RISC design from HP and the various ARM chips. They are both RISC types and I am sort of surprised that HP does not go with its own CPU architecture. What is the "magic sause" in ARM?

HP stopped selling PA-RISC in 2008 and will end support at the end of 2013.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa366778(v=vs.85).aspx#physical_memory_limits_windows_7 No Windows 7 Home Premium OEM 16 GB cheap box for dev soon :)

What's your definition of "cheap"? Yeah, Microsoft charges USD 200 for Windows 7 Home Premium retail, but HP's selling a 16GB system for $1,269.99 with Windows 7 Home Premium.

Hell, if we don't require Windows, even the company everybody likes to beat up for making horrible overpriced machines will sell you a 16GB Core i5 iMac for USD 2100 (1TB disk rather than the 750GB disk on the HP, but a 2.7GHz quad-core Core i5 rather than a Core i7-2600 quad-core "up to 3.8GHz" with Turbo-Hydramatic, err, sorry, Turbo-Boost).

Buy an old PC. Make sure it has SATA for HD, ATA is too slow. Buy two 1TB SATA HD's, slap them in the system and install linux using a software RAID. I personally prefer to install to 1 drive and use a seperate partition on that drive for data, call it /data. I then have a script that mirrors the content of that drive to the second drive on a nightly, or weekly basis. You can even do some "fancy" hardlinking to keep multiple versions, without taking up much space, email me if you need more info about that.
The periodic mirroring provides redundancy and versioning, it also protects me from fat fingering and having to fall back to offsite backup. I automate it with cron and if I make a major change, I can always kick it off manually. If I have a drive failure, I don't need to mess with RAID. I don't think RAID makes sense for a 2 drive system.
Use your USB drive for periodic offsite backup!

I've worked at HP for ten years. Won't buy HP anymore either. Brother is what I buy and recommend. Unlike HP, Brother doesn't "hold its nose" about interfacing with Mac. I will never forgive HP for charging an extra $200 on so many of its printers for the "privilege" of using their printer on my computer of choice.

When my mom wanted a computer for her Mac I told her to look at Brother and not HP. She got the printer up by herself in less than an hour. Never would have happened with either an HP Wintel box and/or HP printer.

I looked up to HP when I was kid in the 70s but now I just hope and pray HP dies quickly because they don't represent a single value of the original HP anymore. That last 10 years or so HP has simply been gang-raping the corporate brand value for its own exploitation and not delivering on that brand promise at all.

They even put customer loyalty ahead of profits in the corporate objectives now (Bill and Dave logically had it the right way: profit then customer value - what good are customers if you are unprofitable?!??!). It's no wonder HP is so screwed up. When they can't even get the basics of business right what hope is there?

Handy link: http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/investor/board.html

The second part of your post was in ignorance I believe. Former AOL CEO, Former Verizon President, current Nokia General Manager, current CEO of Lucent ... that's not bad for "people who've run tech companies" ... could do a lot better, could do a lot worse.

The first part of your post was right on. Not enough diversity on HP's board of directors. Need at least one director from non-profit company, one from academia, and preferably another active CEO. If you want diversity in a board of directors for a profitable company, lookup Exxon-Mobil's board of directors --> http://www.exxonmobil.com/Corporate/investor_governance_directors.aspx

To the GP's post ... HP's board of directors has changed 6 of its 13 members this year alone (counting the new CEO).

Now, what is important is that there's a good workflow for the project, and tools can certainly help with that, But most projects don't necessarily really need tools. There's a lot of projects that simply don't have enough changes to really require any tools at all for their work flow; if you only have a few hundred patches per release, you can maintain those just about any way you want, including entirely by hand. - Linus Torvalds
Note that this is not neccessarily my belief, I did find the interview thought provoking - and it seems very applicable for this question (it was discussed on /. recently btw).

Mozilla Foundation should read the article about Linus's experience with Linux Kernel (Slashdot also ran the story couple of days ago). The article is here: http://h30565.www3.hp.com/t5/Feature-Articles/Linus-Torvalds-s-Lessons-on-Software-Development-Management/ba-p/440
After finishing it, they should read it again ad nauseum until they they understand that one sentence about meeting the expectations of customers.

Well since the Carly's first order of business was getting rid of those fools who might interfere with her plans to destroy every major PC manufacturer...WAIT A MINUTE? Carly single handedly (with Michael Capellas help) destroyed the number one and number two PC manufacturers...Coincidence? I wonder if she's met Michael Dell or Steve Jobs? Hrmmmmm....

You're close, they're in Brazil....that's the big market that EDS was focusing on when HP took over. In terms of emerging IT markets, that's the place to watch. I'd pay attention to Chile too.

Sometimes I need to scale vertically and not horizontally. There are times when you need a single chassis with 200+ cores and 8TB of ram and hundreds of PCIe slots for IO. You can take my pSeries from my cold dead hands.

Intel solutions are getting there with 80 cores and 2TB of RAM.

However, when it comes to moving IO, nothing beats big iron.

But I blame HP. HP has had a wonderful alternative called a "digital sender" which is basically a high-speed document scanner (50 to 55 ppm) which looks just like a fax, except it goes to email address (in PDF, JPG, TIFF formats), utilizing a simple interface.

But the price is too fricken high! If they had been smart and offered it at a reasonable price, we could have been replaced the fax by now.

We use HP Service Center where i work (Fortune 100 company) for our ticket/incident management system. http://www8.hp.com/us/en/software/software-product.html?compURI=tcm:245-937082&pageTitle=service-manager Not as nice as Siebel MSE, imho, but it does what it needs to.

Hp has announced they are going to do one more production run of the HP Touchpad: http://h20435.www2.hp.com/t5/The-Next-Bench-Blog/More-TouchPads-on-the-Way/ba-p/68749

"We knew what technology was available," Bill said, "and we figured out how little bits of it would fit within the area where we wanted to be. There was not one giant step that we took at any point; there were a lot of little steps. Pretty much we just stuck to our knitting. I think we were concerned about making a technical contribution and we operated on the assumption that if we made a contribution to society, rewards would follow."

Can you imagine any exec at HP saying something along those lines today?