eWeek is reporting that HP's Windows 7 based tablet PC, demonstrated by Steve Ballmer at CES is, contrary to previous reports, alive but delayed to October. Other reports say that it will have WebOS from HP's recent Palm acquisition. Over on CNET, Erica Ogg isn't calling it either way.

HP's own site still has promo up. Certainly they are pushing Philip McKinney as a personality with vision.

So... An HP tablet is coming in October. Will it have W7? Maybe. Will it have WebOS? Maybe. Will you be able to choose from these? It seems unlikely given the history. Compaq showed a Windows tablet at Comdex in 2001. Nothing came of it, nor did anything come of the Compaq/HP tablets that followed. All of those came with Windows.

If it arrives, it's late. By then there will be 9 million iPads in the market, and dozens of Android on ARM alternatives to compare it to. Will it be a compelling product? We'll see. HP definitely has the manufacturing chops to pump out a bunch of these. They have first rate engineers. But will their partnership commitments result in a compromise product that's lackluster in performance, has an interface that's not suitable for the form factor, requires the requisite and power-sucking Windows antimalware suite? It's possible, especially if HP gets a really sweet W7/Server 2008 licensing deal in return. Microsoft can be really persuasive, and they have a large number of "special relationships" available to sweeten a deal. Whether they can sweeten a deal to be worth more than the $1B HP paid for Palm remains to be seen. To me it would be a shame if the net result of HP buying Palm was to kill WebOS in order to get a better deal on Windows. Palm was better than that even though they made some business missteps recently and found themselves cash poor at an unfortunate moment.

Clearly there are some CEO level executive negotiations going on between Microsoft and HP. Hopefully these will become open on Groklaw one day. For now we have to wait and see if HP is ready to compete in the new world. My guess: if they come out with a W7 only tablet it will suffer the same fate as all their other Windows tablets - unit sales that peak in the tens of thousands. If they give us a choice between Android, WebOS and W7, they've got a chance of making something that catches the wave - a chance to be a part of the new people-centric consumer electronics world. If they fail it, well, there's always all those other vendors who are willing to give us what we want.

We shall see.

A couple months ago my Achievements page clicked over from 32 to 64 +5 moderated comments. I decided to try to increment the +5 moderated comments counter on my Achievements page again with 64 more +5 comments. For NYCL or Bruce Perens this is a day's work but it took me a good while. Today I managed to achieve this goal and arrived at 2^7 comments moderated +5.

To commemorate the occasion, here it is. Lovely. I would have preferred this one. To my credit, most of the posts were going for insightful or informative and were modded correctly. In the whole time unfair moderation was very rare, and easily countered with a followup post at +2 bonus.

It's not very hard to do. Post at 1. If you post at 3 with karma and subscriber points and your first moderation is funny or insightful which most people default to +1, then the post looks like it's +5 moderated to the moderators, but (I think) those bonus points don't count - it has to have four legitimate up-moderations. Say the usual stuff. It helps to post early in a thread, and best to get the first one if you can do it and not get modded to oblivion.

Along the way I had one post that was so controversial it was modded over 30 times before sticking short of +5 but well in the visible range. I wish I could remember which one that was.

At one point I was getting so many mod points it was scary. I think I only used them up once.

Karma is neither cumulative nor persistent, or now I could be a real jerk and get away with it. That's probably for the best.

I guess my rambling point is that moderation does seem to work. I guess since it gave me the incentive to do this, maybe the achievements thing works too.

The new page design is still broken, and the home page now reports that it is too large to load into my BlackBerry so I'm down to slashdotting about 1/2 as much.

Was it really only nine months ago that Fusion-IO launched their IODrive(pdf)? Since then they've gotten VC funding and made strides in new product (pdf).

For those who aren't following along, they make an Flash memory data storage product that looks like a 320 GB drive, but rather than connecting through legacy SATA interface it connects through the much faster PCI Express (PCIe) interface. By using RAID techniques to "stripe" the data across multiple flash chips, an abstraction layer to hide failed memory cells and intelligent logic to provide wear levelling they take fallible flash chips and turn them into reliable static storage that has performance characteristics more familiar in RAM. Their first version pulled in over $10K for a 320GB card.

They weren't the first out the door with this technology, and they weren't the last. Now OCZ has stepped up with a PCIe flash storage device that offers up to 1TB of storage in one PCIe slot and delivers it at a claimed 500GB/s. Now PhotoFast has one that does the same at 1GB/s for under $5k. That's not 1Gb/s. It's really one billion bytes per second.

Combine this with the new Nehalem technology available in platforms like the HP DL370 G6 with NINE PCIe G2 slots. Add free SAN software with HA clustering, unlimited snapshots, unlimited storage and other popular features like openfiler. Mix in a little Infiniband QDR.

Now you can have for under $60k a box that delivers 6TB of storage that does >1 million IOPS and can deliver that at about 96Gbit/s, in 4U. For another $5k you can get a MDS 600 5U to attach to that box that holds 75 of these 1.5TB 3.5" drives. Add 75 of this Drive sled and you've got over 100TB of slower storage at 3Gbps for an upgrade cost of under $20K. Even with 24/7 unlimited systems enterprise level support for five years you're looking at less than $100K. And it scales to infinity.

So here we are, with 6TB of insanely fast storage and 100TB of nearline storage, HA, thin provisioning, iSCSI and remote admin delivered at insane bandwidth. In 9U, for under $100k and burning less than 1000W, with unlimited LTU and unlimited support converged with current network architecture. And the speed and performance of the flash devices is more than doubling every nine months at the same time as the price goes down by more than half.

8Gbps FC San just got here. There isn't even a FCoE standard approved yet and when it is, it's not as fast as this by an order of magnitude.

Is the classic FC SAN dead?

Toshiba will show a 0.5T SSD in a 2.5" form factor at CES according to CNET. The drive is expected to cost $1,652 in "sample quantities". The drives are reported to perform 240MBps max sequential read and 200MBps max sequential write using MLC flash memory. IOPS information is not yet available.

It may be time to recant my bias toward SLC in relation to MLC, at least in terms of laptop drives. The preference IRT database cache and server drives will have to wait until full benchmarks are available. They seem to have sufficiently exploited the benefits of parallel ICs to defeat the performance advantage of the underlying technologies.

The interface is not specified in the article but it's probably SATA 2.0. The SAS version is probably 3-5 years out, as is usual.

SO just found this game. It's been what, three days, and already there's a shoe throwing Flash game. The responsiveness of modern culture continues to amaze.

As of now the top countries shoeing the US president are The United States, France, Australia, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt, United Kingdom, Germany and Pakistan.

I usually give positive moderations lots of slack - I may think a joke or an article is lame, but if somebody wants to moderate it Insightful or Funny, fine - I'll mark those moderations as Unfair/Unfunny if they're promoting obvious trolls or whatever, but that's not common.

Negative moderations are usually obvious also, but the one that I don't give much slack is "Redundant". If an article really was duplicating existing content at the time it was written, or is just adding a content-free me-too, then it's redundant, but if it's a +1 article written two minutes after the main slashdot article, and somebody posts something similar but much more insightful an hour later that makes it up to +5, the first one is still Not Redundant. Maybe it's Overrated, maybe it's Flamebait, and I'd let those moderations through, but I'll call a "Redundant" as "Unfair" if it wasn't redundant enough.

"Flamebait" gets a lot more slack - sometimes there are articles that I strongly agree with (even if I've written them myself :-) that are aggressive enough that they get Flamebait, and I'll usually let those stand - but I try to ding any moderations where the moderator's calling something Flamebait just because they disagree with it.

The one meta-moderation I have trouble with is when somebody rates something as "Funny" that looks like it was intended to be serious, not funny (and wasn't accidentally funny either.) Does marking the moderation Unfair undo the moderation, decreasing the posting's status? Or does it just ding the moderator's karma, which is fine...?

I have a section for "The Book of Sean", my brain dump onto the web. I also have photos from my various nerdy projects.

ok, so it needs a body.

Blogging is lame enough - it's a way of nagging people who don't write their own HTML into at least writing text and links. Guess I can't flame them too much, given that I've done almost no edits to my web page in years :-) So here *I* am, not even getting my own Blogging software for my web pages, much less writing it myself - I'm just using /.s.

• Designate a master in the /etc/hosts file
• Create an xterm init script that basically calls: X -query master
• Strip down runlevel 4. (Including xfs)
• Add xterm to runlevel 4.
• Tweak the /etc/X11/XF86Config file. Change FontPath to FontPath="tcp/master:7100"

On the server, tweak /etc/X11/gdm/gdm.conf (next journal entry.)