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This information comes straight out of the mouth of three Best Buy (store 483, Rego Park, NY, US) employees, a blue shirt sales guy, a white shirt manager, and a black shirt Geek Squad guy, on exactly 2009-08-30 and it was said front of myself, my wife, and my mother. Some of the quotes I am paraphrasing from memory since I did not record the conversation, this time around.

BB: "You cannot buy any of the HP G60-445DX that we have [about 8 in stock] locked away in the cage [in front of you] because they all have been pre-optimized and you need to pay for the optimization package already installed." - Best Buy Employees - Blue Shirt and Black Shirt Walking by to Assist

Me: "I want to buy this model HP G60-445DX shown in your circular and also shown on your web site as available in-stock from the Best Buy web site for the advertised price in both places for $529.99 USD. Wipe the machine and use the restore disks to bring it back to the original factory configuration and sell me the laptop."

BB: "No, you have to pay for the optimization package already installed on these laptops. We cannot sell you the laptop and we cannot wipe and restore it. Why don't you leave and come back next week on Thursday when we get another laptop shipment and try to come early and call ahead to get one before we start optimizing all of the ones that come in." - Best Buy Geek Squad Employee (Black Shirt)

Me: "Why can't you sell me the laptop that you have right there in front of me in the locked case behind the gray bars?"

BB: "We [Best Buy employees and management] are ordered by the company to pre-optmize most or preferably all incoming laptops, especially the ones that are advertised in the weekly circular newspapers and we cannot sell them without this package." - Best Buy Employees & Manager

That day I went to purchase a HP-Laptop with AMD Turion X2 Dual-Core Mobile Processor - Model G60-445DX (SKU: 9377104) for $529.99 USD for my mother to replace her old Dell. I wanted the laptop without any optimization package, pre-installed software, or warranty service since I am a senior server admin with experience and certifications for the Microsoft OSes and also laptop hardware certifications (including HP ASP) for the HP laptop hardware and I have access to HP's part replacement system for my own repairs.

We walked out of the store after wasting almost a full hour arguing with employees and managers to buy the laptop. I did not give up but instead used my HTC Mogul web phone to get on the Internet and I placed the order for the laptop on the Best Buy web site for a pick-up in the same store 483 for the original price of $529.99 USD + $47.04 tax for a total of $577.03 without any optimization charges. We paid by credit card on the web site. Magically the order was accepted, and a few minutes later as we were shopping in the mall I got the "Your order is ready for pick-up" e-mail on my phone.

All three of us stormed into the store and walked straight to the Customer Service counter on the right side. We told them we want the pick-up the order number and they went and got the laptop. The white shirt manager who was arguing and refusing to sell us the laptop half an hour past was the one who brought it over to customer service and he did a double-take to see us again. He looked at the order information and my mother's name taped to the laptop and noticed that the total price was $529.99 without the optimization charge. He walked over to the Customer Service girl and told her to hold the laptop while he want to talk to the store manager to verify that he can actually give and sell us the laptop

HP provides some decent server gear (and network gear, now that they bought 3com)

I beg to differ with your assertion.

See this article from 2008. Last time I checked, that was in the last 10 years, and I would qualify that as great engineering. You are probably to young to remember when the transistor first revolutionized tech; but my guess is that this research will have a similar impact over the next 10 years.

Given the existence of things like this HP thin client (1.2GHz Marvel ARM Soc, 512MB RAM, 512MB flash, DVI video, running a modified version of Debian(though they don't really like to talk about that), $199 quoted price, quite possibly less, given how enterprise product pricing tends to work) I'd say that building ARM nettops is clearly possible; but(depending on exactly how far down HP actually goes on the stated price) their may not be a whole lot of margin to work with.

What other 10 year old OS is still supported and given new features?

I can think of an OS that just celebrated its 32nd birthday a few months ago:

http://h71000.www7.hp.com/

Yes, it's still in use - I work with it every day.
ps. Get off my lawn.

I don't know what "pretty much end-of-life Windows XP" you speak of. I'm replying to this from Windows XP Media Center Edition. 10-20% of the computers on display at Best Buy last week were netbooks and nettops with Windows XP. Most HP workstations have "Windows XP Professional 32-bit (available through downgrade rights from Genuine Windows® 7 Professional 32-bit)" and "Windows XP Professional 64-bit (available through downgrade rights from Genuine Windows® 7 Professional 64-bit)" as options as of today; until this week (last week of December 2009), if I remember, they didn't have any operating system options except "Vista® Business 32-bit with downgrade to Windows® XP Professional 32-bit custom installed" and "Genuine Windows Vista® Business 64-bit with downgrade to Windows® XP Professional 64-bit custom installed". Why? Because people who buy computers for a business environment will not buy Vista, at any price, for real production work — fair or not. I have clients who will not buy a computer unless it has Windows XP. Despite Microsoft again attempting to remove the previous OS from the supply chain by force despite overwhelming demand, just like they have before, XP is still being sold new on a very large portion of computers.

Memory management is a non-issue with RAII, smart pointers, Boehm garbage collector, and finally Valgrind.

This smells like an argument you've wheeled out before.

Firstly, Valgrind is not something you use on a production deployment of a webserver; it's performance overhead is really substantial. (Good tool, but makes all memory accesses much slower.) Your suggestion makes me suspect that you don't write high-performance websites for a living. (There are nasty gotchas if you don't go fast enough.)

Secondly, RAII only solves some kinds of memory problem (where other languages would use a finally clause) and it is not syntactically clear when it's being used (not unless you're only using it close to the declaration of the class concerned, but that's got other issues). It's OK when you can bind the object lifetime to a scope, but that's definitely not always true. Smart pointers are better general tools, but rather noisy and inefficient (their refcount management is necessarily conservative and so ends up adding some overhead, which is not necessarily good for cache coherency). They also don't tackle circular structures (if that matters to you).

Lastly, full GC has substantial costs of its own (it increases memory consumption of the application, and churns that memory around more rapidly) and a generational collector will outperform pure Boehm on many workloads, though the fact that the Boehm collector supports thread-local allocation is a big plus; a lot of workloads can be split nicely into parts that are constrained to a single thread. The Boehm GC is good, but is it the right kind of good for a website implementation? I'd need to see some evidence - not just opinion - before commenting in depth.

Ummm, did you look at those items? Only the first one is a thin client, the others are just very small computers running regular windows.

HP's offering: http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF05a/12454-12454-321959-338927-3640405-4063703.html - $199
This is ARM-based mind.

From Dell:
http://www.dell.com/us/en/home/desktops/inspiron-zino-hd/pd.aspx?refid=inspiron-zino-hd&s=dhs&cs=19
$250 right now, but was about $200 during black friday

From Acer:
http://www.frys.com/product/6054148

Your C++ info is so 90s. FYI:
A descent C++ web framework: Wt
Memory management is a non-issue with RAII, smart pointers, Boehm garbage collector, and finally Valgrind.
Qt or LiteSQL don't need to be "standard" to do their job.

HP's offering: http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF05a/12454-12454-321959-338927-3640405-4063703.html - $199
This is ARM-based mind.

From Dell:
http://www.dell.com/us/en/home/desktops/inspiron-zino-hd/pd.aspx?refid=inspiron-zino-hd&s=dhs&cs=19
$250 right now, but was about $200 during black friday

From Acer:
http://www.frys.com/product/6054148

$200, has been $180.
To be fair, all these products are very recent, and I wouldn't expect anyone to be aware of them.
There are others too, but they tend to cost more.

Dell and HP netbooks suck. They put the right/left mouse buttons beside the touchpad instead of below it. Makes it a lot more uncomfortable.

I've no idea about Dell ones, but it's definitely not true for all HP netbooks. The ones that are "consumer targeted" do that indeed, and I agree that it's very inconvenient. But HP Mini 5101 doesn't do it (and is positioned as "business netbook"), and is otherwise awesome, especially if you get the higher-res model.

Ah, Linux gets disk level clustering?

It is interesting to compare with what VMS offered 25 years ago:
- VMS could have multiple nodes (can DRBD? It is not obvious from the web site.)
- All VMS nodes have read and write access to the file systems
- The distributed lock manager helps with file locking in this case.
- VMS has the concept of quorum to avoid the "split brain" syndrom mentioned on the web page.

About 4 months ago. I've tried to find it on HP website (I've ordered it online from them), but apparently it's gone now: "product unavailable; click here to find resellers". Here is the new page (with no "Buy" link).

I think it might not count as a netbook, though, as it's customized to have 2Gb of RAM (wasn't there a limit on 1Gb for Windows "netbook license"?) as well as a higher-res, 1366x768 display (not sure if that affects anything).

Interestingly enough, the choice was actually XP/SLED/FreeDOS, and SLED and FreeDOS cost the exact same amount. Does HP have a bulk license from Novell or something?

Be sure to avoid any of the HP i7 processor models. They have a major motherboard problem, as I have luckily learned myself by buying one. Check some googling with HP i7 crash freeze, etc. Or go here to see gobs of users with problems:

http://h30434.www3.hp.com/psg/board?board.id=lockups

However, I hear that home made PCs on i7 platforms are fine as well as recent Dells. I'm going the Asus motherboard route to rectify my problem. It's just grand though b/c they are way expensive, then I need a new case (b/c HP uses the lefty cases), and I need a new heat sync/fan (b/c HP is proprietary). So to fix my $1200 HP, I have to spend 5 or 6 hundred. WEEEE!

Running Windows 7 Ultimate perfectly fine on a Compaq SR1610NX from 2005. Stuck a Hauppage card in it to get HD OTA TV, run Media Center on it, record and play TV shows, watch them from my Xbox. Has some more memory, since I also played games on it, like World of Warcraft.
SR1610NX

• The My Documents folder is a special folder that, by default, is located on the C:\ drive
• That most software, Explorer.exe itself included, by default, will recurse subdirectories
• Most of the things discussed here can be changed, like what folders you are sharing, and even where My Docs points can be changed too...like to a different drive
• If you have anything above retard level intelligence, you'd know to keep sensitive material anywhere but a default, commonly trolled, and (lacking proper security) easily exploitable folder like My Docs...
• ...Like, say, in an encrypted, password-protected archive on a flash drive you never let out of your sight? Or better yet, said archive on a fully encrypted portable hard drive that you make sure not to leave plugged in...
• Best solution, don't run your p2p on the same system as for super secret government work; you could maybe try running the p2p under a restricted linux virtual machine? At bare minimum, create a separate special user account specifically for either accessing the sensitive files, or else a restricted one for p2p activities

...then I'm inclined to think they're speaking as security experts, seeing as to how they've most certainly passed their advanced computer science classes. This isn't Soviet Russia, I'll skip the propaganda, thank you very much.

SATA attach SSD has achieved price parity with enterprise SAS, the density is almost there, and the performance completely blows it away. We're not at the end of spinning disc, but you can see it from here.

The new performance tier of storage is PCIe attach SSD. At two terabytes of storage and 1.5GB/s per slot, we're getting close to what we used to get from Ramdisk in performance and adequate density at 3TB per rack unit including server (HP DL785 G5 or equivalent). Yes, this is expensive right now, but the performance tier always has been. This is for trading platforms, HPC and such. These are approaching 2M IOPS and 40TB per 7U server.

The second tier is 2.5" 256GB SATA SSDs. You get 3TB per rack unit including the server. About the same cost as SAS for 10x the performance. Software options enable you to scale this to infinity in both bulk and performance. Great for databases, VMDK files and iSCSI. Get the hot-swap version and leave some open bays so that when the 1TB 2.5" SSDs come out you can migrate your LUNS with no downtime.

The third tier is SAS spinning disk. At something like 20TB/Rack unit (excluding servers) you can use this to serve frequently used files.

The fourth tier now is SATA spinning disk. At roughly the same density as SAS spinning disk for one-fourth the cost, this is a good candidate for deduplicated targets like virtual tape libraries or deduplicated NAS. It's also a good place to store your snapshots. With modern snapshot technologies there's no good reason to not store snaps every 15 minutes or so. Typically you would park this storage offsite for DR purposes so you can avoid the Premium Microsoft danger eXperience(**).

Storage pros probably would note that I neglected to mention tape and Fiber Channel. That's neither accident nor ignorance. The only reason for tape is legally mandated tape backups, and I consider this the IT equivalent of legally mandated hitching posts outside every business (which laws persist in some places) - if you gotta, you gotta, but there's no reason any more to consider it a necessary or good practice. As for Fiber Channel, it just doesn't fit in the model any more. I know this hurts the feelings of folks who just dropped a million bucks for a single rack of SAN storage with 100TB, or worse - popped for the new 8GBit stuff complete with a converged ethernet/FCoE solution, but it's true. There's just no reason for fiber channel any more. It just doesn't have the bandwidth to support a modern storage solution and it costs too much. Sure, it's got redundancy from the disc to the file server, but so what: modern file servers use redundant storage and clustered redundancy and don't need the diminishing returns of embarassingly expensive drives, head nodes, capacity licensing and annual support contracts. By the time you figure in oversubscribed ports in your FC network, you've lost the supposed reliable performance benefit of the whole thing. This isn't bad news for Cisco - they're going to sell a lot of 10Gbit Ethernet ports before they get cheap and they haven't lost anything by being also compatible with FC. It really bites to be EMC this week, but they'll figure it out.

Check the specs on this server, this card, this drive and this array. This is off-the-shelf stuff, not pie in the sky. The interconnect people need to get off their butts, but this is all doable right now. The compute side becomes an almost trivial cost of what it takes to maintain this storage bandwidth and capacity. If you like proprietary solutions HP sells a thing called the LeftHand Virtual San App

SATA attach SSD has achieved price parity with enterprise SAS, the density is almost there, and the performance completely blows it away. We're not at the end of spinning disc, but you can see it from here.

The new performance tier of storage is PCIe attach SSD. At two terabytes of storage and 1.5GB/s per slot, we're getting close to what we used to get from Ramdisk in performance and adequate density at 3TB per rack unit including server (HP DL785 G5 or equivalent). Yes, this is expensive right now, but the performance tier always has been. This is for trading platforms, HPC and such. These are approaching 2M IOPS and 40TB per 7U server.

The second tier is 2.5" 256GB SATA SSDs. You get 3TB per rack unit including the server. About the same cost as SAS for 10x the performance. Software options enable you to scale this to infinity in both bulk and performance. Great for databases, VMDK files and iSCSI. Get the hot-swap version and leave some open bays so that when the 1TB 2.5" SSDs come out you can migrate your LUNS with no downtime.

The third tier is SAS spinning disk. At something like 20TB/Rack unit (excluding servers) you can use this to serve frequently used files.

The fourth tier now is SATA spinning disk. At roughly the same density as SAS spinning disk for one-fourth the cost, this is a good candidate for deduplicated targets like virtual tape libraries or deduplicated NAS. It's also a good place to store your snapshots. With modern snapshot technologies there's no good reason to not store snaps every 15 minutes or so. Typically you would park this storage offsite for DR purposes so you can avoid the Premium Microsoft danger eXperience(**).

Storage pros probably would note that I neglected to mention tape and Fiber Channel. That's neither accident nor ignorance. The only reason for tape is legally mandated tape backups, and I consider this the IT equivalent of legally mandated hitching posts outside every business (which laws persist in some places) - if you gotta, you gotta, but there's no reason any more to consider it a necessary or good practice. As for Fiber Channel, it just doesn't fit in the model any more. I know this hurts the feelings of folks who just dropped a million bucks for a single rack of SAN storage with 100TB, or worse - popped for the new 8GBit stuff complete with a converged ethernet/FCoE solution, but it's true. There's just no reason for fiber channel any more. It just doesn't have the bandwidth to support a modern storage solution and it costs too much. Sure, it's got redundancy from the disc to the file server, but so what: modern file servers use redundant storage and clustered redundancy and don't need the diminishing returns of embarassingly expensive drives, head nodes, capacity licensing and annual support contracts. By the time you figure in oversubscribed ports in your FC network, you've lost the supposed reliable performance benefit of the whole thing. This isn't bad news for Cisco - they're going to sell a lot of 10Gbit Ethernet ports before they get cheap and they haven't lost anything by being also compatible with FC. It really bites to be EMC this week, but they'll figure it out.

Check the specs on this server, this card, this drive and this array. This is off-the-shelf stuff, not pie in the sky. The interconnect people need to get off their butts, but this is all doable right now. The compute side becomes an almost trivial cost of what it takes to maintain this storage bandwidth and capacity. If you like proprietary solutions HP sells a thing called the LeftHand Virtual San App

The U2400 is either a low power Core 2 Duo CPU from Intel or a Nano CPU from VIA. The Mini 5100 uses an Atom N280, which is a different processor entirely. While all three are supported quite well by Linux, none of them do much for wireless networking.

What you probably have is an HP un2400 (USB ID 03f0:201d), which uses the Qualcomm GOBI chipset. You'll need the qcserial module to run it, and that is included in the 2.6.31 kernel which ships with Ubuntu 9.10. I can't speak for how easy it will be to use, but support is in the kernel and will be installed by default if you upgrade to The Koala.

These 379 dollar ones: http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF04a/3709945-3709945-3328410-241641-3722790.html

Of course you will need one of these to get a working system - which not only are a little bigger than just one Mac Mini, HP also wants me to "ask for prices".

These 379 dollar ones: http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF04a/3709945-3709945-3328410-241641-3722790.html

On U.S. site, there's no prebuilt model with Linux, so you have to build a custom one. At that point, the Windows version would cost you $581, and "alternative OS" (which means either FreeDOS or SLED) is $530. That said, both are more expensive than prebuilt versions, unfortunately...

(and yes, it'll be cheaper than if you order it with Windows).

When I (from the dutch site) look it up, its 369 EUR for the Linux version with a 1024x600 display, and 359 EUR for the windows version (with a 1366x768 display). So, at least on the dutch HP site the linux version is not cheaper.

(and yes, it'll be cheaper than if you order it with Windows).

When I (from the dutch site) look it up, its 369 EUR for the Linux version with a 1024x600 display, and 359 EUR for the windows version (with a 1366x768 display). So, at least on the dutch HP site the linux version is not cheaper.

Unfortunately, it's not easy to find Linux-only netbooks.

HP Mini 5101 is one of the best netbooks around in general (IMO, obviously), and you have an option of getting it with SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop if you want (and yes, it'll be cheaper than if you order it with Windows).

That good sir, depends on how much money you have. http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/en/WF04a/12169-304612-82176-82176-82176.html

Google has patents on the built-in battery design, "but I think we'd be willing to license them to vendors," Hoelzle said.

Oh, so it's $FOO, but in a server.

Running computers on batteries? It got a patent?

I think there is a good bit of prior art if only one knows where to look.

I mean, really. This is a good idea, and it's about darn time a large-form-factor motherboard running on low voltage is available, but IMHO this should not be patentable. It's simply designing around a low-voltage input.

Looking at HP's press release (for example), it's not all that hidden.

http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2009/090625xa.html/

The program will enable customers who purchase qualifying HP PCs to enjoy the benefits of a new Windows-based PC immediately and receive a free(1) upgrade to Windows 7 when it becomes available in October...

(1) Shipping and handling fees may apply depending on retailer/reseller.

http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF25a/321957-321957-64295-3740645-3955549-3784202.html These are nice notebooks, and with the ultra life battery that attaches to the bottom you can get up to 12 hours of battery life.

I'm not a printer engineer, but I'll back this guy up from the end-user and retail side. This has been the primary printer in our office for a couple years. The page count is 20k with no maintenance or cleaning: zero jams, zero misfeeds.

We sell them too. They originally sold for $899, and included regular toners (most include "introductory" toners). We recently picked up some on liquidation for $225. The four toners (drums attached) are worth almost twice that. What we can't sell (people want cheaper printers), we simply pull the toners for our own printer, and keep the empty printer for parts. You'll note that ordering parts for this unit is not a problem.

Personally I'd go specifically with the LaserJet 5m

I concur. Note that the 'm' suffix means 'Macintosh' and indicates that it comes with ethernet and PostScript 2 as standard.

We had one of these and it needed rebooting for almost every print (after about 2 years reliable service).

then I bricked it trying to upgrade the firmware (I knew that was a risk).

The relevant HP forum thread is long and full of irate customers.

The tx2xxx series also tends to ship with Broadcom wireless cards that have an alarming failure rate, we've had to replace untold numbers of these.

Between this and the problems with most of the rest of the HP laptops we see coming in at work my opinion of HP has gone from bad to worse in the last couple years.

Sure, you could do it with a cluster of workstations. You would need some insane interconnects. OR, you could just buy this pre-configured system from SuperMicro with dual quad-core Nehalems and 4 Nvidia Tesla C1060 GPU Cards. That's 960 thread processors @1.3 GHz if you don't overclock, 16GB of DDR3 @ 1.6 GHz on a 512 bit bus, 16 threads of system CPU with up to 96GB of system RAM. It pulls close to 4 TFLOPS, in a desktop machine. You probably could break into the top500 with ten of them with decent interconnects since the #500 spot is Rmax 17.09 TFLOPS and Rpeak 37.64 TFLOPS. If you prefer a top 3 OEM, you can get that in a Z800 workstation from HP.

To put that in a time scale for you, that one desktop available today by itself would have easily been one of the top 100 supercomputers in the world only five years ago and would still have been in the top500 3 and a half years ago.

A little spendy for a wordprocessing and light spreadsheets, but a sweet piece of gear nonetheless.

But "exists as an open-source hobby project" is a bit bringing back your dead lover as a zombie.

Yeah, this sure looks like an open source hobby project to me.

It may not be the juggernaut of the industry but to call it dead is a gross overstatement.

Re. Alpha, as might be apparent from other posts there is more than one market for chips. According to http://h18002.www1.hp.com/alphaserver/?jumpid=reg_R1002_USEN there were over 1 million Alpha chips sold between 1992 and 2007.
That's OK, considering that it was derailed by HP in favor of the Itanium.
Maybe to some people, every chip has to run Windows to have any importance, but that is a parochial attitude. Those Alphas are out there doing some serious work, rather than spreadsheets and games, and they were doing so when Intel chips were good only for spreadsheets and games.

As someone who manages roughly 160 HP servers (and trialed competing IBM products which had these nice little blue motherboard modules to license their remote management application with) "Blatantly ignorant or plain troll?" Indeed:

From HP: http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/servers/management/ilo/
"iLO is available in two forms, iLO Standard and iLO Advanced. iLO Standard provides basic system board management functions, diagnostics and essential Lights-Out functionality as standard features on iLO supported ProLiant servers. iLO Advanced provides remote administration functionality as a licensed option."

Also, only ilo2 is based on IPMI though you might be hard pressed to find the original ilo modules still around.

I hope your smug attitude gets you somewhere someday.

http://www.pcengines.ch/alix.htm

http://www.soekris.com/

Do you recall that we were talking about servers? These aren't even systems. They're boards, used for building embedded applications.

Now you're going to accuse me of weaselling. I did say "servers". Servers generally come with a chassis, a power supply, and (drum roll please) embedded adapters. Show me any x86 server — hell, any x86 system that works off-the-shelf without having to be built into something — and I'll admit I was wrong.

http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF05a/15351-15351-3328412-241644-241475-1121516.html

I'm actually familiar with that puppy. It's the HP competitor for one of the Sun servers I used to work with. And guess what? It's got an embedded video adapter. As you'd know if you read your own fucking link.

http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/using-intel-amt-serial-over-lan-to-the-fullest/

I'll say it one more time, then I'm going to give up. I never said that server systems don't support headless operation. Of course they do. I only said that video support was standard in x86 servers.

Now stop being a retard and google your own fucking links.

Dude, I never get into a Slashdot flamefest without Googling for a few links to help make my case. It's just that I usually don't bother to Google for links that support something I know not to be true.

Pretend that you're a grownup for a few seconds, and admit that you had your facts wrong. Which happens to all of us. So suck it up and admit it. It might be hard on the ego, but it's a lot less work than the rhetorical hoops you have to jump through to avoid admitting a mistakes.

http://www.pcengines.ch/alix.htm

http://www.soekris.com/

http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF05a/15351-15351-3328412-241644-241475-1121516.html

You have been able to get serial over TCP/IP for a while too, and Intel even build it in to some boards:

http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/using-intel-amt-serial-over-lan-to-the-fullest/

Now stop being a retard and google your own fucking links.

BS! It was less than $100. No where near your $500.

You didn't look hard enough, then

Ya, Using your own link, I configured the Alienware laptop with similar specs to the 17" MacBook Pro and it came out costing $3,269. Try it yourself configure the Alienware with these specs:

Alienware M17x

• Intel® Core(TM)2 Duo T9800 2.93GHz (6MB Cache, 1066MHz FSB)
• 17-inch WideUXGA 1920x1200 (1200p)
• 4GB Dual Channel DDR3 at 1333MHz - 2 x 2048MB
• 500GB 7,200RPM w/ Free Fall Protection
• Dual NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 260M, 2GB - SLI® Enabled

Canadian dollars.

Seeing that ca.dell I thought so. Now let's see what Yahoo! says about the Canadian and US conversion:

Currencies Center, Canadian $3,269 = US $3001. That is more than US$100 more than the 17" MBP So my stance still is valid.

Or are you honestly telling me that you bought a 24" external monitor that cost $800?

I said nothing about an external monitor. Since you brought it up though I've been looking at getting the 24" HP LP2475w. It uses H-IPS panels which are the recommended panel for photographers and other graphic artists. The HP LP2475w itself is recommended by photographers.

Even if you had to wait 6 months to see a cheque (Dell usually issues credits/cheques within 3-6 weeks, btw), you're still coming out ahead.

From the numbers above I come out behind not ahead.

Unless you actually *want* to spend a boatload more cash than you need to in order to get a pretty apple logo on the back of your LCD.

Now you're trolling.

Falcon

Well, obviously the volatile drives aren't much faster than Intel's SSDs. Most SSDs are already starting to bump against the upper limit of what you can get out of SATAII when doing sequential reads.

The first ones I saw were for the PCI-slot and that one is limited to 133 MB/s and 266 MB/s for 64 bit PCI, both of which are lower rates than SATAII.

PCI Express of course starts at 250 MB/s per lane and tops out at 1 GB/s per lane for the latest version. Compare that to DDR3 which peaks at 12.8 GB/s per channel. To saturate a PCIe x16 lane we could settle for three DDR3 channels.

Size is another concern of course, as most of these things tends to go for sockets to plug the memory into.

So, you could try to top out a system with 160 GB of DDR3 RAM (would require 30 blocks), costing $14,099.7. And I'm not entirely sure, how you'd fit 30 blocks of RAM onto a single PCIe card, even if it's full length. This setup would obviously only be performance limited by the PCIe bus and the card's memory controller.

Now, HP StorageWorks' IO Accelerator 'only' provides about 700 MB/s depending on the workload, but only costs slightly more than half of the DDR3 solition at $7,700.

The biggest problem with the PCIe-based volatile solutions is fitting enough memory to be useful and that you're fucked if there's a bad power outage. The non-volatile PCIe solutions' biggest problemt hey're hideously expensive compared to regular SSDs and the only advantage they have to RAID-0'ed SSDs is the IO performance, as raw speed is faster if you raid a few of Intel's SSDs to a good controller.

And all the PCIe based storage mechanisms have one huge problem - non-bootable.

Well, obviously the volatile drives aren't much faster than Intel's SSDs. Most SSDs are already starting to bump against the upper limit of what you can get out of SATAII when doing sequential reads.

The first ones I saw were for the PCI-slot and that one is limited to 133 MB/s and 266 MB/s for 64 bit PCI, both of which are lower rates than SATAII.

PCI Express of course starts at 250 MB/s per lane and tops out at 1 GB/s per lane for the latest version. Compare that to DDR3 which peaks at 12.8 GB/s per channel. To saturate a PCIe x16 lane we could settle for three DDR3 channels.

Size is another concern of course, as most of these things tends to go for sockets to plug the memory into.

So, you could try to top out a system with 160 GB of DDR3 RAM (would require 30 blocks), costing $14,099.7. And I'm not entirely sure, how you'd fit 30 blocks of RAM onto a single PCIe card, even if it's full length. This setup would obviously only be performance limited by the PCIe bus and the card's memory controller.

Now, HP StorageWorks' IO Accelerator 'only' provides about 700 MB/s depending on the workload, but only costs slightly more than half of the DDR3 solition at $7,700.

The biggest problem with the PCIe-based volatile solutions is fitting enough memory to be useful and that you're fucked if there's a bad power outage. The non-volatile PCIe solutions' biggest problemt hey're hideously expensive compared to regular SSDs and the only advantage they have to RAID-0'ed SSDs is the IO performance, as raw speed is faster if you raid a few of Intel's SSDs to a good controller.

And all the PCIe based storage mechanisms have one huge problem - non-bootable.

A plain-vanilla SAN is worth every penny.

Especially now that you can get them from distressed companies who paid too much for them a couple of years ago, $15,000 will get you a refrigerator-sized solution. Straight retail on a 2U san is still getting cheaper every year. http://h71016.www7.hp.com/dstore/ctoBases.asp?oi=E9CED&BEID=19701&SBLID=&ProductLineId=450&FamilyId=2569&LowBaseId=15222&LowPrice=$1,899.00

These cost a bit and have drives which fail at a fairly infrequent rate. It doesnt' hurt that the data center is kept at 64 degrees by two (redundant) chillers and has 450 KVa redundant power conditioners keeping the electricity on at all times. (We do shut off the power to the building once a month to check these and the diesel generator housed on the premises as well.)

Now - paying $x,xxx per year for maintenance on these units is cheap insurance in my mind. If something goes wrong, HP is available 24/7 to be onsite with replacement parts. This has - in fact happened - during the past few years. A controller on the array went bad, causing disk read failures. We instantly called HP, had a tech onsite, and had the controller replaced within a few hours of the problem being detected.

OTOH - for someone's 4 petabyte home pr0n collection, this might be a good idea! :P

Do a comparison yourself if you don't think the Mac Tax exists. It does.

The Mac Tax does not exist.

MacBook Pro "17

• 3.06GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
• 4GB 1066MHz DDR3 SDRAM - 2X2GB
• NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT graphics processor with 512MB of GDDR3 memory
• MacBook Pro 17-inch Hi-Resolution Glossy Widescreen Display with a high-resolution 1920x1200 pixel LED-backlit display
• 500GB Serial ATA Drive @ 7200 rpm

Total: $2,849.00

Alienware M17x

• Intel® Core(TM)2 Duo T9800 2.93GHz (6MB Cache, 1066MHz FSB)
• 4GB Dual Channel DDR3 at 1066MHz
• Dual NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 260M, 2GB - SLI® Enabled
• 17-inch WideUXGA 1920x1200 (1200p)
• 500GB 7,200RPM w/ Free Fall Protection

Total: $2,774

Dell Precision Workstation M6400

• Intel® Core(TM) 2 Duo T9900 (3.06GHz, 6M L2 Cache, 1066MHz FSB)
• 4.0GB, DDR3-1066MHz SDRAM, 4 DIMMS
• ATI FirePro M7740, 1.0GB
• 17" UltraSharp(TM) Wide Screen WUXGA (1920x1200)RGB LED Edge 2 Edge Disply
• 500GB Hard Drive, 7200 RPM

Total: $3,414

HP EliteBook 8730w Mobile Workstation

• Intel® Core(TM) 2 Duo T9900 (3.06GHz, 6M L2 Cache, 1066MHz FSB)
• 4096MB (800-MHz, DDR2, 2DIMM)
• NVIDIA Quadro FX 2700M 48-core CUDA parallel computing processor 512MB (dedicated)
• 17-inch diagonal WUXGA (1920x1200)
• 500-GB SATA Hard Drive (7200 RPM)

Total: $3,203.00

I'd rather pay my Microsoft tax and get an OS that is compatible with the majority of hardware out there then pay a similar amount of money on the Mac Tax and get a computer plagued with incompatibilities for much of the software that exists.

Not only can I install Mac software on my Mac, I can also install Linux and Windows software on it. Try installing Mac software in Linux or Windows.

Of course, I am reliant on very little Windows-only products. I only use 2, but I do know those two can be royal pain in the ass to use on a Mac.

Before switching from Windows to both Linux and OS X I made a list of what I wanted to do, not specific software but tasks. I then looked at what was available for each task on each platform and I didn't find anything I needed Windows for, everything I wanted and needed to do I could use a Mac for, and most could be done with Linux as well.

Falcon

Absolutely true. Don't believe it? Check out the list of operating systems officially supported by HP for their servers. It's not like Dell or any of the other major server players are any different on that front. Oh, and yes, you're reading that list right - Debian and Ubuntu Server are both fully supported.

It was quite a while ago. The only one I can find now is this: http://www.shopping.hp.com/webapp/shopping/computer_can_series.do?storeName=computer_store&category=notebooks&a1=Category&v1=Ultra-Portable&series_name=tx2z_series
I'd say it's expensive for the size, but it's cheap for a tablet PC.

Linux just isn't ready for the desktop yet.

Translation: I haven't tried it.

the average computer user isn't going to spend months learning how to use a CLI and then hours compiling packages so that they can get a workable graphic interface to check their mail with

I've always thought Ubuntu has very extensive driver support, as do many other distros. Who needs the CLI when there are multiple desktop environments to choose from? How many does Windows have? Oh, right, one...

I'm not the only one who thinks they are user-friendly... Already many big-name vendor laptops are coming out with some form of Linux pre-loaded. Take a look at the HP laptops that are now being offered with Mobile Internet O/S... from the page: " Mobile Internet is a user-friendly, all-inclusive interface built on Linux."

especially not when they already have a Windows machine that does its job perfectly well

haha, good one!

and is backed by a major corporation as opposed to Linux which is only supported by a few unemployed nerds living in their mother's basement somewhere.

Red Hat is a major corporation. It's publicly traded on the NYSE (ticker: RHAT) and doing rather well. You should consider investing. You should also know that Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a fully supported release which offers several high availability service contracts... which is why a lot of US Government systems are now running RHEL. Not to mention it's faster, less expensive, and more secure.

The last thing I want is a level 5 dwarf (haha) providing me my OS.

I don't blame you, I'd want at least a level 12 mage!

Sounds a lot like Lights Out Management eh. Seen this in Sun and HP too.

Nowhere in that link did I see info about selling Alpha systems.

Perhaps HP did stop selling them, I see where they say they supplied AlphaServer until 2007. OK, I was wrong. I found this: "HP discontinued production of AlphaServers at the end of April 2007. The production of new options stops in April 2008."

And FX!32 is not an interpreter, it's a dynamic long term caching recompiler. They got it up to 50% native speed, and had headroom for more.

Whatever it was, it was not that good. Of the number of programs I bought I was only able to install one, Borland C++ Powerbuilder, on it. Yes I have an Alpha computer, one of my knees is touching it now.

And the bad name Alphas acquired came from poor support from MS

It was Microsoft's responsibility to make sure software ran on Alphas? Or was that the responsibility of DEC? I admit I trash MS and don't like the company but it's not their responsibility, they had none with regards to Alphas. They didn't even have to release NT4 for Alphas. Now having said that the NT4 Workstation running on my Alpha is the best version of Windows I've ever used and I've used Windows 3.x to XP. Not once did it crash, freeze, or show me the Blue Screen of Death. XP on the other hand froze the first tyme I booted up a PC with it installed. It didn't finish booting so I had to physically turn it off, by holding in the power button.

Falcon