1 REM my super cool game
2 ON ERROR GOTO 6551
51 GOTO 6552965529
61 PRINT "game over!"
62 END
521 ON ERROR GOTO 52529
522 PRINT "wat";
523 GOTO 1652916529
651 PRINT "you lose!"
652 GOTO 61
6551 RESUME 521
16529 LOCATE ,1
16551 IF ERL>0 AND ERL<65529 THEN PRINT "you win!"
16621 GOTO 61
52529 PRINT "the universe is broken!"
52659 RESUME 65129
65129 PRINT "you divided by zero didn't you!"
65529 GOTO 651

+1 internets to anyone who can figure out (and accurately describe) what it outputs, how it self-modifies, or in general just about anything about it worth knowing. Hint: the GW-BASIC tokenizer is doing weird things.

It's nice to see the city's pre-approved police budget is being put to some use, harassing protesters in front of City Hall. I sat and watched for a while to see what unbelievable excuse they would come up with for sending this guy packing. It was a quiet, legal protest. In fact, he even stood far enough back from the curb to avoid violating the sign bylaw. We obviously don't need the downtown patrols if they have nothing better to do than give the nearest nutcase a hard time. CPS - Standing Up for Your Freedom of Speech. Thanks guys, I don't know what I'd do without you.

Check out the photo.

The Calgary Herald reports that a project to move Alberta to electronic health records will cost over CDN$1.4B. The project, which started in 1999 has suffered from "poor project management as well as shoddy oversight of users accessing sensitive patient information." The project has still not been completed, and neither the final delivery date, nor cost to taxpayers is known. And, Canada is now falling behind other governments in making these electronic health records available to institutions, allowing for increased efficiency in patient care. According to the Calgary Herald, Australia, Norway, New Zealand, the UK and the Netherlands have all implemented electronic patient records to the point where over 95% of doctors use them. In Canada and the United States, that number is less than 50%. Not surprisingly, it appears that at least the user interface component will be developed for Microsoft Windows, and that security of these Windows systems is being managed directly by the doctors, who are not generally certified IT security professionals (this last statement based on my observations over the last few years during patient visits).

Though the article does not specifically mention technologies, many Slashdot readers will recognize the Microsoft standard of poor project management and shoddy oversight of users accessing sensitive information. I strongly suspect that the reason the other countries named in the article have had more success with implemention of electronic patient records is that they are using open source alternatives, and hiring consultants who have not been corrupted by Microsoft's greed. It is clear that many governments in Canada have been seduced by the "simplicity" of Microsoft due to their lack of technical understanding, to the tune of billions of taxpayer dollars. I hope that public knowledge of the extravagant spending on these ineffective eSolutions lead to better processes surrounding awarding of government contracts, and more accountability for overspending and deadlines, as well as ensuring that a governement remains vendor-neutral.

It is the vendor neutrality part that does not seem to be considered when awarding government contracts. Were government officials more aware of the true cost of a commitment to Microsoft technologies, it is likely that less would be awarded, at least assuming that they haven't been bribed already. Far too many projects are approved without analyzing the long-run commitment to the vendor who provided the solution, and are then forced to buy a myriad of support and maintenance contracts, consultants, licensing fees, upgrade costs and development costs with no real results. In other words, good money after bad. I no longer wish to live in a jurisdiction who will gladly hand over my tax dollars to Microsoft. If Microsoft is now being dictated by the Alberta government, it is time to get the hell out of Alberta. This is not something I take lightly; I have waited for years for positive progress, but it is all negative. Microsoft has infiltrated into Alberta government, and municipalities will follow suit quickly. I will not work in that mismanaged environment, and I will go elsewhere to find an environment that has not yet been corrupted.

That I am old enough to remember where my current .sig came from, or that nobody else is.....! For those who are suffering from a memory lapse, here is the sig: "The world is in darkness. To erase data is to suppress truth; to halt computing is to shackle the mind."

Ok, ok, you're too lazy to google it, so here's the link: Son of Hexadecimal Kid

According to the Center for Automotive Embedded Systems Security, there are serious security flaws in the existing technology. Not necessarily a big deal, for now, as they observe that the risks are low at the current time. Emphasis on "current". They also state that no crackers have been observed to use the required level of sophistication. Again, emphasis needs to be on "observed". Yes, it may well be a while before automotive networks reach the point where this is exploited in the wild (at least to any scale), but I would remind you that it took Microsoft from Windows 3.0 through to Windows XP Service Pack 2 to take security even remotely seriously. That's a long, long time. And Microsoft had nothing like the install-base of the car industry. Further, the qualifications required by most companies to be a system administrator were a good deal steeper than the requirements for a car mechanic, so systems administrators were likely far more familiar with the issues involved. Also, said systems administrators are far more accountable for security issues, since there are plenty of third-party tools that novice users can use to spot malicious software.

The first question is why this even matters. It doesn't affect anyone today. No, but it's guaranteed to affect at least some current Slashdot readers in their lifetime and, depending on how rapidly car networks develop, may affect a significant fraction surprisingly fast. Technology doesn't move at Stone Age speeds any more. Technology advances rapidly and you can't use obsolete notions of progress to determine what will happen next year or over the next decade.

The second question is what anyone could seriously do, even if it was an issue. Not too many Slashdotters own automotive companies. In fact, I doubt if ANY Slashdotters own automotive companies. Well, the validation tools are Open Source. MISRA has a fair few links to members and software packages. In fact, even if developers just developed an understanding of MISRA's C and C++ specifications it might be quite valuable as it would allow people to understand what is being done (if anything) to improve reliability and to understand how (if at all) this impacts security. You don't get reliability for free, there will be some compromises made elsewhere.

My previous entry mentioned the creation of the new IIS business unit at the City of Calgary. Mayday marked their first spectacular failure. My source reports rumors that the tax bill print run failed twice over the period from 30 April until 5 May. Apparently, the entire tax database needs to be put into read-only mode for the entire duration of the printing of over 200,000 tax bills. This was done on Friday. The first run failed on Sunday, leaving the tax database in read-only mode at start-of-business Monday. The second attempt failed, with an Out-of-Memory error. Read-write access was restored only at end-of-business Wednesday. At twenty City employees had work backlogged as they require read-write access to do their work. They were delegated to following up on the backlog by contacting each and every customer affected, and advising them that their request would be delayed. Of course, now that read-write access is restored, those twenty employees will have to go through each and every request again, to do the work they should have been able to do in the first place. Minimum total cost to the taxpayers: 20 employees x $200/day (guessing) = $4,000. Maximum could possibly be 3 to 4 times that.

An out-of-memory error is a thing of the past (or a sign of really bad programming). Are CoC servers really that old? Is the processing of 220,000 tax records such an encumbrance to them that they require 5 full days to make it happen? I hope this is not a sign of things to come. If every single mistake from IIS has this much of an effect on taxpayer cost, perhaps the new business unit was a mistake. My bad feeling has gotten much worse; chaos will reign soon if they can't make their aging infrastructure reliable.

I've been having problems with Enterprise DB. This company maintains the Windows port of Postgres, but I have been finding their customer service.... less than satisfactory. This is the second time in, oh, 21 years that I've actually been infuriated by a company. However, to be entirely fair to the business and indeed the sales person, it is entirely possible this was a completely freak incident with no relationship to normal experience. There were all kinds of factors involved, so it's a messy situation all round, but the hard-sell aggressiveness and verbal abuse went way beyond what I have ever experienced from a professional organization in two DECADES. What I want to know from other Slashdotters is whether this is about on-par with the tales of meteorites landing on someone's sofa (which is my personal suspicion) or whether it's a more insidious issue. Please, please, please, do not take one incident as a general rule. I've not seen any article on Slashdot or LWN reporting wider issues with them, which you know perfectly well would have happened had there been a serious, widespread problem. Especially with all of the reporting on database issues over recent times and the search for alternatives to MySQL once leading developers defected and major forks arose.

This is, however, a major question. Like it or not, we need databases we can rely on and trust, which means that when they are backed by companies, we need the companies that back them to be honorable. (PostgreSQL itself isn't owned, so I trust the engine itself just fine. The development team is very impressive - and, yes, I do monitor the mailing lists.) Value-added only has any added value if it's valuable.

What is worse, from my perspective, is that my current boss is now treating it like this is how companies work when reselling Open Source products. His practical experience was being on the receiving end of all this. If we're to take advantage of the freedom (and bloody high quality) provided in the Open Source world, I need to deprogram him of the notion that they give hassle and sell grief. Does anyone have any experience doing this?

An anonymous source at the City of Calgary mentions that a new director of the new Infrastructure & Information Services (IIS) business unit has been named. The same source mentions that at least one .NET project was canceled after it ran over budget. Is the City of Calgary throwing good money after bad? I've got a bad feeling about this. As a taxpayer, I'm very concerned about the wasting of public funds to bail out poorly managed software projects. The City already runs on Oracle, and a J2EE environment would allow them to keep their Linux servers without any issues, whereas Microsoft management inevitably recommends that non-Microsoft servers be replaced. Having heard the background of the new director, I have my concerns about his technical ability to lead an technology-based business unit. Microsoft types in those positions are often "domain experts" who have very little understanding of the technical challenges that implementation will face. The consultants that Microsoft requires you to hire to get technical support are also exceedingly expensive (I've heard quotes of $10,000/wk.) Again, this is a massive waste of public funds that shouldn't even be considered given the failure of previous projects. Oracle provides a perfectly good alternative, and is a company that the City already does a lot of business with.

The main problem with the J2EE development environment is that it's a lot less standardized than a .NET one. However, there's some really excellent software out there to help manage all of the issues with J2EE development. This article will focus specifically on Eclipse since it is available for free, and works well with all other required components.

I'm going to walk through the introduction to the SpringSource MVC Tutorial using instructions specific to Eclipse. Once you've run through this introduction, you'll understand how the project setup differs in Eclipse, but you'll still be able to follow along with the tutorial. I'm assuming a fresh install of Eclipse. I downloaded Eclipse for Java EE Developers. I'll leave the setup of Eclipse as an exercise for the reader. I would recommend that you use the 32-bit JVM to run Eclipse, as there are many issues with 64-bit Java, and 32-bit Java works fine for J2EE applications (which still run on 32-bit machines here anyway).

OK, once you've got Eclipse up and running, go to Help -> Install New Software... Add the following update site: Maven 2.x Integration for Eclipse. Install the Maven Integration (it's the only update available from this site). I also installed Maven WTP Integration from Maven Integration Extras. Finally, I installed Spring IDE.

Next, we'll create the project. Right-click in the Project Explorer, and select New -> Dynamic Web Project. Call the project springapp, remove src from the source folders path (we'll configure that in a minute) and change the default output folder to be target/classes. Create a Tomcat 6 server runtime or use an existing one. Change the WebContent directory to be src/main/webapp. Right-click on the springapp project, and select Build Path -> Configure Build Path. Select the Source Folders tab, and check the "Allow Output Folders for Source Folders" option. Make sure the default output folder is set to springapp/target/classes. Click the Add... button and add two source folders: src/main/java and src/test/java. You will have to create the source folders in the Add dialog. For src/test/java, expand and select Output folder. Click Edit... and select the Specific output folder radio button, and enter target/test-classes. We don't need the resource folders for this project. Now your project is created, and we'll add the remaining parts of the project, Maven and Spring.

First, start with Maven. Right-click on the springapp project, and select Maven -> Enable Dependency Management. This will prompt you to fill in the information for your springapp project. I used org.springsource for the group Id and springapp as the artifact name. I changed the packaging to war. You can change these options later by double-clicking on pom.xml once Maven Dependency Management has been enabled. Next, M2Eclipse will prompt you to add any Maven artifacts you need to the project. We only need one for now, spring-webmvc. Entering this in the quick-search box will find the artifact org.springframework.spring-webmvc very quickly. I used version 3.0. The remaining Spring components will be automatically imported as spring-webmvc depends on them.

There's one last problem that may need to be addressed. When I added Maven Dependency Management, I noticed that JRE System Library in the Libraries node was set to J2SE 1.4. Since I use the Tomcat 6 server runtime in this example, there will be a build error, since Tomcat 6 needs Java 1.5 at a minimum. You should have installed J2SE 1.6 prior to installing, Eclipse, but if you didn't, now is probably a good time. Make sure you have at least Java 1.5 if you don't upgrade to the latest version. Now, right-click on the JRE System Library and select Properties. Make sure the Execution Environment radio button is selected, and select J2SE-1.6 from the drop-down next to it. If J2SE 1.6 (or 1.5) isn't in the list, click the Execution Environments... button, and add a J2SE 1.5 or greater home directory. When you change the version of the JRE System Library, the build error should disappear in a few seconds.

By default, however, Eclipse WTP does not export the Maven artifacts to your WEB-INF/lib directory. This will lead to many error messages like "Wrapper could not find class org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet", and other ClassNotFoundExceptions when trying to execute your Controller. So, to fix this problem, first delete the lib folder from src/main/webapp/WEB-INF (it will be created automatically by Maven). Then, right-click on the springapp project, and select Properties. In the left pane, select Java EE Module Dependencies, and check the box next to Maven Dependencies. This will now cause your Maven dependencies to be packaged in the project WAR, and eliminate the corresponding ClassNotFoundExceptions. The project is almost complete, but the Spring Project Nature has not yet been added. There are two ways to do so. We'll use the first and discuss the second later. Right-click on the springapp project, and select Spring -> Add Spring Project Nature. There's now a new node marked Spring Elements in your Project, but it's currently empty. That's it! The project is prepared.

Create the index.jsp by right-clicking on the springapp project and adding a JSP. Notice that by default, the JSP will be created in src/main/webapp, exactly where it is supposed to be. Copy and paste the code from the tutorial and save. Select index.jsp from the Web Content node in your project, and click the run button. It should automatically deploy to Tomcat and display in a new tab in Eclipse. Now, add the HelloController class by right-clicking on src/main/java under Java Resources, and adding a new class. Use springapp.web for the package and call it HelloController. Add the Controller interface from org.springframework (if it doesn't appear under Libraries -> Maven Dependencies, edit pom.xml and ensure that spring-webmvc is added in compile scope in the Dependencies tab. Copy the code for HelloController from the tutorial.

Now, we'll create the HelloControllerTests. First, however, we'll need to add junit in test scope. Double-click on pom.xml and select the Dependencies tab. Next to the Dependencies pane (which should have only spring-webmvc listed), click Add... and search for junit. Make sure the test scope is selected before adding it. Now, right-click on the src/test/java folder and create the class springapp.web.HelloControllerTests. Change it to inherit from junit.framework.TestCase. Copy the single test method from the tutorial into the HelloControllerTests class. You should now be able to Run As JUnit Test, and see the lovely green bar in your JUnit tab in Eclipse.

Finally, we'll create the hello.html bean. First, however, we need to configure the DispatcherServlet. Right-click on the springapp project, and select Add New Servlet. Notice that you can add an existing class instead of one of yours. Choose the org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet, add a URL mapping *.html, and remove the "/springapp" URL mapping. Next, you need to configure HelloController to respond to the URL hello.html. Adding a new Spring Bean Definition springapp-servlet.xml from the project context menu to your project in src/main/webapp/WEB-INF will create the servlet configuration for you. This is the second way to add the Spring Project Nature, as there is an option which adds it if required when you create your first Spring Bean Definition. Choose only the beans namespace, and add the bean definition from the website to your springapp-servlet.xml. Lastly, the hello.jsp referred to by HelloController needs to be created. Create hello.jsp in src/main/webapp and copy the code from the tutorial. Your project is now ready for deployment. Start the project by clicking Run on index.jsp. When the browser opens up in Eclipse, simply change /springapp/index.jsp to /springapp/hello.html, and the contents of hello.jsp should display. You should now be able to follow the rest of the tutorial without a problem.

The purpose of this guide was to introduce an experienced Java programmer to the true power of Eclipse. While the above may seem to be overly difficult compared to other IDEs, that is the cost of the flexibility of Eclipse. This guide has shown how to configure a very specific J2EE configuration, using very specific tools. However, other toolkits may use different project layouts and build tools. The Eclipse integration of major tools, however, has allowed for a truly visual experience. I did not type a single line of XML during the course of this guide, nor did I configure a single build property in an XML file or require building from a command line. The difficult administration tasks of managing dependencies (and versions!!) and packaging for deployment are handled professionally by Maven. Maven also lends itself well to test-driven development, by specifying a project layout that includes test source and resource folders, and allowing dependencies to be added in test scope without changing the deployment. Spring IDE combines all of your Spring elements in a single node for easy access, and is capable of validating your Spring components prior to deployment. And, the Dynamic Web Project from Eclipse WTP provides an easy way of managing your Web Project visually, allowing you to add Servlet, Filter and Listener classes without directly editing web.xml. While this project targeted Tomcat 6 running on Java 1.6 (32-bit), it would be equally easy to target a different J2EE platform. YMMV, but I hope that you find this to be as pleasant and productive a development environment as I do.

Just one final note: I've tried creating a Dynamic Web Project as a Maven Project and adding the Web Facet, but this no longer uses the Web Project layout in Project Explorer. I prefer the Web Project layout, as it makes it much easier to find components in a large project.

A petition calling for the return of perhaps the most important television show since The Great Egg Race is currently running but isn't exactly getting anywhere fast. It is vitally important that intellectually-stimulating shows be encouraged -- the consequence of failure (24 hours of Jersey Shore on all channels) is too horrible to contemplate. Unfortunately, as things stand, that's exactly what we are heading towards. Save your television and your mind before it's too late!

Nissan's national tour of their new electric vehicle offering, the LEAF, recently completed its last stop at the Liberty Science Center in Jersey City, New Jersey. Nissan representatives were on hand answering questions about the car and their plans to bring it to market, and I was able to collect a lot of good information which the Slashdot community might find interesting and useful. Below is a fact-dense summary of everything I was able to tease out of them.

The LEAF is a 5 passenger, 4-door hatchback bearing a striking resemblance to the currently available Versa, although once you see it in person it becomes obvious that the car is an entirely new platform designed specifically as an electric car, rather than a tweak of an existing vehicle. First impressions, shared by other visitors I met, was the vehicle was much bigger than the phrase "electric car" brings to mind.

The LEAF's technical specifications are no less impressive, though still somewhat tentative as production is not scheduled to begin until this fall:

80kW (107.3 HP) synchronous AC motor producing 380 ft-lbs (280Nm) torque. 24kWh worth of air-cooled, modular (48 modules, 192 cells total), laminated lithium-magnesium batteries located under the floor and rear seats giving a listed driving range of 100 miles (as tested under LA4 methods, aka "the city test") and a max speed of over 90MPH (144KPH). Curb weight is approximately 3300 pounds (1500 kg) including the 480 pound (217 kg) main battery pack. The main battery is rated for full capacity from -30ÂF to +100ÂF (-34ÂC to +38ÂC) and has a life expectancy of 7 to 10 years, with "end of life" defined as capacity degraded to 70% of the original. The LEAF comes with four wheel disc brakes and two stage regenerative braking which can recover up to 30% of the vehicle's kinetic energy in most situations. Brakes are hydraulic (w/ electric booster) and steering is drive-by-wire. A cable operated parking brake is also included.

Power from the main battery is cut in the event of an accident for safety. It is not known if a separate kill switch for disconnecting the battery manually will be provided.

The LEAF is capable of three charging options: it comes standard with a 110v outlet charging cord, allowing you to plug your car into any 15 amp outlet for charging via the charger incorporated into the vehicle itself. Charge time for 0% to 100% is estimated at 16 hours using 110v. Alternatively, you can charge the car using 208v using a required "charging station" in about 8 hours from 0% to 100%. Both of these methods use the same J1772 socket, recently made a standard by SAE International, meaning this and all other vehicles that plug in to charge will use the same connectors.

The 208v "charging station" is, I was told, simply a surge protector and over-current protection device which must be professionally installed and certified for code compliance and liability issues. While Nissan plans to offer Nissan-brand charging stations, you will not be obligated to buy one as the 110v charging cord is supplied with the car. Charging stations may also become available from third party manufacturers since they do not contain anything proprietary, and like the J1772 connector should be compatible with any plug-in car on the market.

The third "quick charge" option uses 480v connection through a second, dedicated socket and connector and can charge a dead battery to 80% in just under 30 minutes. Quick charging is halted at 80% to prevent damage to the battery. There are no plans to offer quick charging stations to the general public since very few houses have 480v electric service available. Nissan is working with private companies to install both 208v and 480v public charging stations for general use.

The LEAF includes, as standard equipment, an integrated GPS navigation system which helps you plan routes that pass near by public charging stations. Monthly updates to the navigation system will be provided for free. Also included is 3G communications which allow the on-board computer to send and receive data via the internet. The computer can be configured to send e-mail status updates, and various features such as charging schedules and heat/air conditioning operation can be done remotely via internet connected PC or cell phone. When asked about privacy concerns, the reps said that Nissan plans to collect usage data via an opt-in program only from their initial test users. There are no long-term plans to monitor driving and charging habits.

Other standard features include heated seats and steering wheel, air conditioning, power locks and windows, AM-FM/CD stereo with aux input for portable players, keyless entry/startup and 24/7 roadside assistance. All vehicle lights are LED. Features that are not offered include power seats, sun roof and spare tire.

The "ignition" is a large power button located just below and to the right of the steering column. The rep said there is no delay turning off - meaning you don't have to hold the button - but she never tried it "at speed" so it is unclear exactly what will happen if you turn the vehicle off while driving.

There is no set price yet, but I was given a target range of $28,000 to $33,000 before rebates and incentives. Official pricing is due to be announced in April. At present, the LEAF qualifies for $7,500 in federal tax rebates, along with 50% of the install cost for the 208v charging station (up to $4,000). Additional rebates and incentives may be available from your state government as well. Nissan plans to offer buy and lease options, but they can not offer battery-only leases due to federal laws. The federal government considers the battery to be part of the drive train, and it is illegal to sell a car without a functioning drive train.

Production is scheduled to start in Japan this fall, with a portion of those vehicles being imported to the US for test markets and early adopters. Official announcements are scheduled for December of this year. By 2012 Nissan plans to have a vehicle and battery manufacturing plant operating in Tennessee with a capacity of 150,000 vehicles and 200,000 battery packs per year.

Because I have a blog at http://fyngyrz.com/.

It kind of makes the whole journal thing redundant. If you really want to see what I have to say about random things, by all means, you're invited to the blog. If not, well, it seems you're in substantial company, if nothing else. :)

Well, it's 2010. Is it the year of Linux on the Desktop? Probably not, but here's 3 more reasons to love Linux.

1. LADSPA, the Linux Audio Devloper's Simple Plugin API. There's a lot of gems in here, though the documentation is pretty sparse right now. MPlayer natively supports these plugins, allowing this handy little piece in .mplayer/config:

   af=ladspa=/usr/lib/ladspa/dyson_compress_1403.so:dysonCompress:-24:0.25:0.5:0.5,ladspa=/usr/lib/ladspa/amp_1181.so:amp:8,ladspa=/usr/lib/ladspa/fast_lookahead_limiter_1913.so:fastLookaheadLimiter:0:-16:0.8,ladspa=/usr/lib/ladspa/amp_1181.so:amp:16

   This complicated audio filter chain uses the Dyson Compressor, Fast Lookahead Limiter, and the Amp plugins to turn on "Night Mode" audio. Great for watching action movies in the middle of the night without pissing off your neighbors! Theoretically, you could also do this at the system level by putting the same filter chain into your PulseAudio server, but I nearly went crazy trying to do that. Steve Harris has some really basic documentation for the SWH LADSPA plugins. These are available in Ubuntu as swh-plugins

2. HandBrake, a replacement for AutoGK, which seems to have trouble running properly under WINE in the latest version of Ubuntu. Instead of messing around with DLLs, try the native Linux version of HandBrake. Encodes in MP4 and MKV formats (XviD apparently on its way out). Ubuntu .debs available on the website.

3. K9Copy, a replacement for DVD Shrink. It's better in absolutely every way: it runs native, and it allows you to deselect titlesets before shrinking without any painful reauthoring. The menus appear identical to the original disc, and everything except the deselected items work properly. Very painless and quick way to copy dual layer DVDs to a standard DVDR, since there's usually a lot of junk (like extra versions) that you don't really want anyway.

So, 3 years now without touching a Windows machine. I think I've died and gone to heaven.

As many Slashdot users have reported, one overzealous, overly-opinionated Wikipedia administrator can send away many useful and well-informed ones. Now there is direct evidence to support that at least one of those authors was working directly for a political cause. William Connolley "created or rewrote 5,428 unique Wikipedia articles" and as a website administrator he acted with "virtual impunity" to remove "more than 500 articles", barred over 2,000 Wikipedia contributors and rewarded those whose edits he was in agreement with. "In these ways, Connolley turned Wikipedia into the missionary wing of the global warming movement."

Read the rest here: Wikipediaâ(TM)s climate doctor

HP is including Linux in its 110 series of netbooks that are shipping now. It goes by various names QuickWeb or Instant Web. When you power on these netbooks, they boot into a splashtop linux instance. The OS is locked down and only the predefined applications could be run. They are browser, photo viewer, music player, skype and some file browser to view files on USB drives. WiFi works. Then if the you want Windows7 or WinXP, you press a button and the machine boots to a full Windows machine.

The Linux part can not see the hard disk of the machine. I just got the machine yesterday and have not poked around much to know how much it can be hacked. The browser is Firefox, I have not even checked to see if I can install noscript on it.

For most users of netbook, this is a very good deal. When you are in a public wifi in a coffee shop or an airport, you are guaranteed not to pick up a virus. I am not saying Linux is more secure or FireFox is more secure. Simply if you stay within QuickWeb or InstantWeb, there is no way any file can be written to the Windows disk at all!

This is such a big brand differentiation and it can be touted to high degree. But HP for some strange reason is very quiet about this feature in its ads and press releases. From business stand point, every company would strive for brand differentiation so that they dont compete on price alone. Quite strange HP is so silent about it. People are spending on purchase and subscriptions to antivirus software. All that revenue could be targeted by selling a device that is guaranteed not to be infected. Once many users realize that they rarely boot to full windows, they and their circle of friends and family would become more receptive to cheaper plain net access devices in various form factors.

I am very sure Microsoft is giving HP hell for this move behind the scenes. Is it the first sign of PC vendors growing a back bone? Or the lackluster promotion of this feature bodes ill for such an experiment? I wonder.