That's a red herring. For majority of Linux applications you *do have* source code, thanks to the OSS licensing. And you won't even have to recompile, there are distros targeting ARM already. The only exception are proprietary applications like Oracle, SAP or Exchange, but this machine isn't designed for such workloads (Oracle needs more memory, SAP and Exchange are Windows-only).

Regarding development - development for Linux on ARM is exactly the same as development for Linux on x86 and very similar to any other Unix. Most people do not write in assembler anymore and the platform differences from the point of view of a business application writer are negligible at best.

FYI - ARM is well supported by Linux since ages ago, not only by Android. These CPUs have been around for a very long time, probably longer than Intel's Xeon. So while you probably won't run your Exchange or IIS on such machine in the near future, it will do just fine for everything else. There are plenty of uses for non-Windows servers ...

Easy - ARM doesn't yet have 64bit cores available, they were only recently announced. It will take a while until the manufacturers license them, integrate them into their products and only then can HP buy them and build a server around them.

From the looks of it, this prototype machine is unlikely to be built for databases (4GB of RAM per chip is not a lot for something like Oracle), so the 32bit limit is not really an issue. On the other hand, this screams HPC cluster/supercomputing or some other well parallelizable load, such as web servers. 32bit CPU is plenty enough for that. 64bit on a server buys you only more RAM, not much else.

It would be *very* interesting to see performance comparison between this solution and the traditional Intel one. If it is only 50% as fast, it should give Intel a lot to worry about - the higher installation density, the power savings will easily outweigh the raw power advantage Intel may have.

If you read the article, they kept functional programming in parallel with imperative one, with focus on proving validity of programs. So part of that is there.

On the other hand, you must balance theory with practice, because otherwise the students will a) leave b) not be able to do practical projects while studying the theory. So teaching only logic programming (which is great, IMO - it helped me a lot!) is not practical.

From the position of someone who used to teach basic programming courses to freshmen, I can only applaud the decision.

Many kids coming to colleges these days do not have any programming experience or a very shaky one at best. Picking up concepts like classes, inheritance, the entire idea behind OO modelling is difficult if you are lacking basics such as how memory is managed, what is a pointer, how to make your program modular properly, etc. From the course description they are going to use a subset of C, I think that is a good starting basis for transitioning to something else (C/C++/C#/Java/... ) later on.

What is worse, many of these introductory courses were given in Java - producing students who were completely lost when the black box of the Java runtime and libraries was taken away - e.g. when having to transition to C/C++. We are talking engineering students here who could be expected to work on some embedded systems later on or perhaps do some high performance work. Even things like Java and C# still need C/C++ skills for interfacing the runtime with external environment.

I think it is a good move, indeed.

I wonder why anyone still takes this Florian Mueller guy seriously.

His fantasy claims were debunked several times already, his blog posts (yes, it is a blog!) are poorly researched sensationalist junk and he still gets the attention of the press? Reminds of the SCO saga reporting :(

This guy is just sensationalist troll seeking attention. Remember how he has recently claimed that he has a "proof" that Google violated Sun's copyrights in Android? It was very soundly debunked. He is just using this "secret" to attack RedHat for no reason - spin alert, guys! Not exactly a credible source to report ...

It feels more like - "Well, we know it doesn't work so well as a phone, but LOOK! YOU CAN BLING OUT YOUR AVATAR!!!! OMG!"

Umm, why not make the WP7 actually useful for being used on a phone first? It's cool to have a mobile gaming console in the pocket, but then I would probably buy a PSP and not Windows smartphone ...

Software patch cannot fix signal attenuation from a hand. Why does this look like only an attempt to make the complaints and bad press go away by making the problem harder to notice? If you have no bars displayed, you wouldn't notice that you are losing signal from holding the phone, because you would be under the impression that the coverage is poor. And in an area with a strong signal you do not see the issue anyway, because the signal level is strong enough to saturate the meter even if your hand is over the antenna.

It looks more like a clever way to disguise the problem and push the blame on the carrier by hiding behind poor coverage, nothing more.

It reminds me of Sony (I think it was them) who "fixed" one of their overheating laptop series by having users download a "patch" that would turn off the power management in Windows and make the fans go non-stop. It certainly stopped the overheating, but at the price of shortened fan life and a very noisy machine ...