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HP is following Dell's footsteps and they are now getting into the gaming fever. Dell has Alienware in its bag since March and now we have HP buying over Voodoo PC, a privately-held personal computer manufacturer based in Canada that was founded in 1991. Like Alienware, VoodooPC specialises in high-end gaming, media center, home office or customized PCs and laptops.


According to Anandtech, you'd better watch out for more Hot Voodoo Stuff in the near future :

Neither Voodoo nor HP would comment on any planned products for either the Voodoo business unit or HP's Gaming division other than to state that the goals going forward would continue to be to build the best possible hardware for the customers. In other words, we should expect to see both strong AMD and Intel solutions, coming out of Voodoo and HP Gaming.


HP Grabs Voodoo PC for More Gaming Dollars source

The news leak scandal over at the HP boardroom is having a lot of exposure on the Net this few months. Now Mike Holston, a partner in Morgan, Lewis & Bockius who was brought in by Hewlett-Packard to investigate the matter has shed some light into the whole investigation. This brings us to another question...is anyone in HP doing any work or are they busy scouring the Net for more news on this sensational news ?

More details in computerworld :

Morgan Lewis has reviewed some of the approximately 1 million pages of documents it received from HP and outside investigators hired by HP to trace the news leaks. The Morgan Lewis probe found that HP hired in 2005 Security Outsourcing Services (SOS), a private security firm, to probe the first series of leaks. Two months into SOS's probe, HP's Global Security division also joined the investigation. The investigation concluded in July 2005 without being able to identify the source of those leaks. Then there was a second investigation with the help of SOS and HP Global Security.

"It is now clear that the investigation included tactics that ranged from the review of HP's internal e-mails and instant messages, to the physical surveillance of an HP Board member and at least one journalist, to the "pretexting" of telephone call information of board members, HP employees and journalists," he said, adding that SOS's legal counsel informed HP that SOS's investigative techniques were legal.

An internal league of people working for computer manufacturing giant Hewlett-Packard suspected that one of it's director is leaking confidential information and now the company is using it's very own Global Investigations Unit to look through the matter. The unit, a small group formed to investigate crimes towards the company is a very low profile and secretive firm makes it very hard to be contacted. However, the state of California's federal authorities are investigating the methods the small Boston based group of collecting information which includes revision of phone records to trace leaks which could lead to breach of privacy - a crime by the state's laws.

HP is set to heat the server market with its new HP's Integrity rx3660 and the rx6600 server. HP's Integrity rx3660 server goes for US$10,531, and the rx6600 starts at US$14,771. Let's hope this time luck is with them since sales of the older Itanium servers were not encouraging. According to research firm Gartner, servers based on the processor accounted for less than one percent of the market nad that's pretty pathetic.

Nonetheless, according to HP marketing manager Don Jenkins, the market should be picking up since application support is not an issue anymore. There was only about 100 in 2003 while there are 9,000 software Itanium-aware applications now.

According to arnnet :

The Integrity rx6600 running Montecito performs close to 350,000 transactions per minute (tmp) -- more than twice the 161,000 tmp of an Integrity running an older version of Itanium -- according to tests by the independent Transaction Processing Performance Council. Montecito is also more cost-efficient, operating at US$2.24 per transaction minute, versus US$3.94 on a previous Itanium chip. The fastest processor tested by TPC is an IBM Power 5, which topped four million transactions per minute with a cost per minute of $2.97, noted Clabby. HP's Jenkins downplayed the significance of IBM's performance numbers, noting that most enterprises only need servers that can perform 150,000 to 300,000 transactions per minute.