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Why must you keep this argument going when you KNOW YOU ARE W R O N G?

Gateway Limited Warranty Statement"1. Technical Support. During the Limited Warranty Period, Gateway will provide product technical support..." options in this section include telephone or online support for the life of the warranty.
IBM (lenovo) Limited Warranty Statement and contact tech support page "An initial
diagnosis of your problem can be made either by a technician over the telephone or electronically by access to a support website." Options for warranty support include online and telephone. "If you are not in warranty, you may be billed for the call."

Why is it such a problem for you to understand this? You obviously have absolutely NO experience in supporting, buying, or using non-apple computers. You have no clue that the industry wide standard is more than what Apple offers.. You have no clue that Apple is the exception to the rule by offering 90 days. They are THE ONLY MAJOR COMPANY IN THIS INDUSTRY WHICH DOES NOT OFFER BUILT IN TELEPHONE SUPPORT FOR THE LIFE OF THE WARRANTY.

Read that again: Apple is THE ONLY MAJOR COMPANY IN THIS INDUSTRY WHICH DOES NOT OFFER BUILT IN TELEPHONE SUPPORT FOR THE LIFE OF THE WARRANTY.

Do you want me to repeat it again? Apple is THE ONLY MAJOR COMPANY IN THIS INDUSTRY WHICH DOES NOT OFFER BUILT IN TELEPHONE SUPPORT FOR THE LIFE OF THE WARRANTY.

When are you going to realize that your entire argument from the beginig of this thread was based on this FALSE ASSUMPTION? How are you going to say things like:

Well, they prove to me that you don't care whether you're right or not.

Gateway does not mention it -- and guess what, they don't offer Dial-A-Geek at all, unless you pay for it.

And, if you're really that paranoid about needing a human voice for the life of your warranty, drop two bills and buy some AppleCare.
And this is any different from dropping MAYBE ONE bill on an extended or premium plan with any other brand?

Apple customers get complimentary phone support from Apple for 90 days for all hardware.
ROFL. Complementary support. That is like saying you get complementary electricity for 90 minutes each day when you rent a hotel room. Give me a break.

Every single one of your posts in this thread are rooted on baseless accusations. No evidence. Complete lack of respect, and total rejection, for the truth. Since you don't know what this means at the end of the day I will tell you: It means you are a hypocrite. It could also mean you are a liar, or ignorant. Or ou are inexperienced. Or you are a Troll.

But I will give you the benefit of the doubt because you claim your aren't a troll. You claim you have experience in the industry (dropping your fake resume). You claim you aren't a liar. So I will believe you and just chalk it up to plain old every day hypocrisy.

I call bullshit on this.

Ever seen the FOSS Linux TPM driver? http://sourceforge.net/projects/tpmdd
Perhaps you never read any of the research IBM has done regarding Linux and trusted computing? This should get you started: http://www.research.ibm.com/secure_systems_departm ent/projects/tcglinux/.

Well, Dell, Gateway, and IBM certaintly do [have Dial-A-Geek tech support for the life of the warranty].

Prove it. Just about any one of the major vendors will have a 90-day, 1-year, 2-year, 3-year, and 4-year warranty. There are a number of quid pro quo issues with warranty information, and if you're concerned about fairness, then let's be fair. Actually, you smell like trollbait to me, but anyway...

Dell's one-year limited warranty.
Here's how you can contact Gateway with your Technical Support issue. Notice the convenient link for upgrading your warranty. Wonder where it goes...DOH!
Here's the Gateway 1-year limited warranty (pdf).
And, for the record, here's Apple's one-year limited warranty.

Just compare and contrast the three warranties for a moment. They're mostly just legalese, but as far as legal documents go, I like something Apple's warranty lists in the first paragraph:

If a hardware defect arises and a valid claim is received within the Warranty Period, at its option, Apple will either:
(1) repair the hardware defect at no charge, using new or refurbished replacement parts, or
(2) exchange the product with a product that is new or which has been manufactured from new or serviceable used parts and is at least functionally equivalent to the original product, or
(3) refund the purchase price of the product.

Nice and easy. And not all that hard to read, considering it's legal information. By the way, I'm not going to waste my time surfing the horrid IBM website to pull up warranty information. Suffice to say that you ain't gonna get one year of free Dial-A-Geek access just because you bought a ThinkPad. You want to study more truth, go here and find the relevant warranty.

Dude when is the last time you have delt (sic) with Apple? The way you claim to be treated has NEVER been a policy with apple (sic).

The last time I dealt with Apple was November 2005, when I went into an Apple Store in Chicago to get replacement feet for my 14" iBook. Like I mentioned before, I walked out with two sets of replacement feet (that's 8 feet), still in the ServiceSource packages. I paid zilch (that's $0.00). I didn't fill out any paperwork, and I didn't get a receipt. All I did was bring my laptop and my request. Walked out satisfied.

And you're probably right. "Policy" is a strong word -- it would suggest that everyone should expect to be treated the same way. I rather think of it as "courtesy." Maybe only those who give courtesy get it, I don't know. Maybe I'm lucky. Or witty, clever, and charming. Or not. All I know for sure is that anytime I've needed anything from Apple (and that's been quite a lot -- I've been an Apple customer since 1981), I always came away satisfied. Maybe it's because I'm knowledgeable enough to avoid buying crappy Performa stuff or consumer-branded (read: low-end) also-ran products. I buy best-of-breed, and I've always gotten a satisfactory return in Apple's support response and product quality. And I really don't think my anecdotal experience is in any way unique. You and that other fellow, however...

You must be a master of persuasion.

Well, thank you. I am also rather good-looking.

I personally know several authorised service providers and none of them would offer this level of service. They pay for these feet. And they are giving them to you for free? Did you even buy the laptop from them? If it was an apple store, do you see what is going on here?

Uh, yeah. Free feet. Actually, that's no

http://www.research.ibm.com/WearableComputing/Soul Pad/soulpad.html

Linux and Windows will never have useful REXX support

Ummm...
REXX for linux: http://www-306.ibm.com/software/awdtools/obj-rexx/ linux/index.html/

REXX for Windows: http://www-306.ibm.com/software/awdtools/obj-rexx/ windows/index.html/

Linux and Windows will never have useful REXX support

Ummm...
REXX for linux: http://www-306.ibm.com/software/awdtools/obj-rexx/ linux/index.html/

REXX for Windows: http://www-306.ibm.com/software/awdtools/obj-rexx/ windows/index.html/

eComstation is keeping the flame alive for those that are interested.

ObjectRexx is also available for many platforms as noted above.

Sure we will eventually move beyond hard drives. But remember when it was bubble memory that was THE next big thing. Didn't happen.

You mean, it hasn't happened yet.

http://www-306.ibm.com/software/awdtools/obj-rexx/

We have apps running in Object REXX on Windows.

At one time you could do a multi-project Mosis wafer. No masks are made,
the data is directly written to the wafer. Each project makes up 10 to 20 die on a large wafer. Flextronics was doing this for a while too, but I believe they have moved to a different business model. Check out the following link to IBM talking about their current Mosis schedule. I'm sure more info is there on the website.

http://www-03.ibm.com/chips/asics/foundry/tools/mp w_sched.html

Good Luck

I recall IBM has a program, where they will make your custom chip. This might have been something in the past, but I think they might still have it.
http://www-03.ibm.com/chips/asics/

...it was recently announced that Linux had been ported to run on a standard wrist watch.

Yeah, for geologic definitions of 'recently'.
http://www.research.ibm.com/trl/projects/ngm/wp10_ e.htm

..it was recently announced that Linux had been ported to run on a standard wrist watch.

You may think you're being funny, but IBM did this back in 2001. So it is hardly "recent". :-)

http://www.research.ibm.com/trl/projects/ngm/wp10_ e.htm

Hell, they even have a version with a 640x480 OLED display.

  -Charles

World's most expensive desktop linux machine

No, I think that dubious honor belongs to this: the IBM IntelliStation A Pro. Take it home today, only $11,779.00.

And that's for a dual-Opteron system with RHEL, it's not one of the big RISC-based AIX workstations. Granted, it does come with 8GB of RAM, Ultra320 SCSI, and a ridiculous display card (3DLabs Wildcat Realizm 800).

Frankly though, I think the Mac looks cooler.

Does nobody know that IBM also uses the Dojo-Toolkit, see http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/191 87.wss?

First they bought out InnoBase, now SleepyCat, and it looks like probably JBoss soon..

Is Oracle/Ellison attemping to simply buy out a good sized chunk of the mature open source offerings? For what purpose I wonder? To stop (or slow down) their competition with Oracle's own products? To use them against Microsoft and/or IBM?

At any rate, I don't like it, not one bit

I'm pretty worried about the JBoss move. I can't imagine Oracle has more than two motives here:

1) Compete with IBM in the smaller, free application server market.

2) Get rid of their open source competition.

I have a hunch that #2 is much more likely. Jboss doesn't just have a competing applicaion server, it also has a competing ORM framekwork (Toplink vs Hibernate).

The download link in TFA has an error

It's not the TFA that had the error, it's IBM's website. Go here and click the Accept License button at the bottom, it will lead you to the broken url.

I found the problem with their site in about half a second. I noticed there was a space between /web/ and wa-ajaxintro3... If you look at the address http://download.boulder.ibm.com/ibmdl/pub/software /dw/web/%20wa-ajaxintro3_ajax-xhr_adv.zip you can notice the %20, which causes the problem.

Remove the whitespace and you can download the file.

Here

I found the problem with their site in about half a second. I noticed there was a space between /web/ and wa-ajaxintro3... If you look at the address http://download.boulder.ibm.com/ibmdl/pub/software /dw/web/%20wa-ajaxintro3_ajax-xhr_adv.zip you can notice the %20, which causes the problem.

Remove the whitespace and you can download the file.

Here

Taking the "%20" away from the final "/" made it work.

(There should be no spaces in the URL.)

404 Not Found

Not Found
The requested URL /ibmdl/pub/software/dw/web/ wa-ajaxintro3_ajax-xhr_adv.zip was not found on this server.

Perhaps someone should write an article on how to write robust AJAX code. Oh, wait...

Um, guess it depends on what you mean by "computing".

Years before the ENIAC was running, IBM was SELLING big ugly boxes that could add, subtract, and multiply, all electronically:

http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/history/year_194 3.html

Fenynman used these at Los Alamos in 1944 to compute critical massses of Plutonium.

And these were programmable, to an extent, with plugboards, which incidentally was more flexible that the ENIAC arrangment of plugs and cables. You could swap plugboards in 5 seconds; reconfiguring ENIAC for a new program could take many many hours.

Eventually ENIAC was re-architected to take instructions from a huge bank of switches, before that it was program by plug.

Ted Selker invented the "joy button" red keyboard cursor control thingie, and developed the "Trackpoint" at IBM's User Ergonomics Research Lab. (Anybody remember the "So Hot We Had to Make it Red" two page Thinkpad ad?)

At one of the New Paridigms for Using Computers conferences, he demonstrated a custom Thinkpad he'd modified to support two Trackpoints at once! It was an inexplicably attractive and approachable interface: operating the computer by tweaking two red nipples! Unfortunately the keyboard was not drool-proof.

He demonstrated another cool custom keyboard job with a piezoelectric buzzer under the Trackpoint, that gave tactile feedback as the cursor moved across textured surfaces and over edges.

He also made conference badges that clip onto a Trackpoint to measure physical motion and position -- it's so sensitive it can be used as a postage scale, wind speed sensor, seismograph and accelerometer.

Unfortunately none of those cool weird technologies made it into production. They require special APIs and deep modification of the desktop user interface and applications, in order to meaningfully exploit the special hardware. Take a look at the DirectX force feedback API that eventually came along, for example -- it's quite complex, and not many applications support it. Applications would have to know about the special hardware and go out of their way to support it, which just won't happen soon, because current user interfaces and applications are extremely inflexible, and have brittle, device-dependent user interfaces.

-Don

Ted Selker invented the "joy button" red keyboard cursor control thingie, and developed the "Trackpoint" at IBM's User Ergonomics Research Lab. (Anybody remember the "So Hot We Had to Make it Red" two page Thinkpad ad?)

At one of the New Paridigms for Using Computers conferences, he demonstrated a custom Thinkpad he'd modified to support two Trackpoints at once! It was an inexplicably attractive and approachable interface: operating the computer by tweaking two red nipples! Unfortunately the keyboard was not drool-proof.

He demonstrated another cool custom keyboard job with a piezoelectric buzzer under the Trackpoint, that gave tactile feedback as the cursor moved across textured surfaces and over edges.

He also made conference badges that clip onto a Trackpoint to measure physical motion and position -- it's so sensitive it can be used as a postage scale, wind speed sensor, seismograph and accelerometer.

Unfortunately none of those cool weird technologies made it into production. They require special APIs and deep modification of the desktop user interface and applications, in order to meaningfully exploit the special hardware. Take a look at the DirectX force feedback API that eventually came along, for example -- it's quite complex, and not many applications support it. Applications would have to know about the special hardware and go out of their way to support it, which just won't happen soon, because current user interfaces and applications are extremely inflexible, and have brittle, device-dependent user interfaces.

-Don

Ted Selker invented the "joy button" red keyboard cursor control thingie, and developed the "Trackpoint" at IBM's User Ergonomics Research Lab. (Anybody remember the "So Hot We Had to Make it Red" two page Thinkpad ad?)

At one of the New Paridigms for Using Computers conferences, he demonstrated a custom Thinkpad he'd modified to support two Trackpoints at once! It was an inexplicably attractive and approachable interface: operating the computer by tweaking two red nipples! Unfortunately the keyboard was not drool-proof.

He demonstrated another cool custom keyboard job with a piezoelectric buzzer under the Trackpoint, that gave tactile feedback as the cursor moved across textured surfaces and over edges.

He also made conference badges that clip onto a Trackpoint to measure physical motion and position -- it's so sensitive it can be used as a postage scale, wind speed sensor, seismograph and accelerometer.

Unfortunately none of those cool weird technologies made it into production. They require special APIs and deep modification of the desktop user interface and applications, in order to meaningfully exploit the special hardware. Take a look at the DirectX force feedback API that eventually came along, for example -- it's quite complex, and not many applications support it. Applications would have to know about the special hardware and go out of their way to support it, which just won't happen soon, because current user interfaces and applications are extremely inflexible, and have brittle, device-dependent user interfaces.

-Don

Ted Selker invented the "joy button" red keyboard cursor control thingie, and developed the "Trackpoint" at IBM's User Ergonomics Research Lab. (Anybody remember the "So Hot We Had to Make it Red" two page Thinkpad ad?)

At one of the New Paridigms for Using Computers conferences, he demonstrated a custom Thinkpad he'd modified to support two Trackpoints at once! It was an inexplicably attractive and approachable interface: operating the computer by tweaking two red nipples! Unfortunately the keyboard was not drool-proof.

He demonstrated another cool custom keyboard job with a piezoelectric buzzer under the Trackpoint, that gave tactile feedback as the cursor moved across textured surfaces and over edges.

He also made conference badges that clip onto a Trackpoint to measure physical motion and position -- it's so sensitive it can be used as a postage scale, wind speed sensor, seismograph and accelerometer.

Unfortunately none of those cool weird technologies made it into production. They require special APIs and deep modification of the desktop user interface and applications, in order to meaningfully exploit the special hardware. Take a look at the DirectX force feedback API that eventually came along, for example -- it's quite complex, and not many applications support it. Applications would have to know about the special hardware and go out of their way to support it, which just won't happen soon, because current user interfaces and applications are extremely inflexible, and have brittle, device-dependent user interfaces.

-Don

I guess you wouldn't be one of those users then would you?

http://publib16.boulder.ibm.com/pseries/en_US/cmds /aixcmds3/mail.htm

Linux:
Yellow Dog Linux runs on Cell. (Link; this is the same military product that is linked to in a Register article further up in the thread.) It's being marketed for semi-embedded uses, like in medical imaging systems, sonar and radar, etc., apparently.

Free Optimizing Compiler:
I have no idea whether there are any compiler optimizations for it in GCC, I suspect not, though. However there is a version of the IBM XL C compiler for it, available here (no idea if registration is required, I didn't attempt to download). I wonder how the IBM compiler is implemented, and whether you could use it in a Linux-based Cell system as a drop-in replacement for GCC. It says "GNU C extensions are welcome."

Here's a link to one of the seminal studies: http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj/171/ibmsj17 01C.pdf You can also check out "Peopleware" by DeMarco and Lister. Offices are good -- if you want/need interaction, you can always invite people in, but it's hard to invite people out of a shared space. The worst "office" environments I've ever been in:
- at one engagement (I was on-staff at a consulting co. for a big client), I actually shared a DESK (not an office), with another programmer. Seriously -- one desk, two PC's, two chairs. Can you guess how productive either of us were?
- Another time, the co. I was consulting for (independent this time) had just finished remodeling their offices, and of course as soon as that was done, they had run out of space. So, they moved all the "consultants" (read, those who actually did real work) into desks strung out along a hallway. Every other person who walked by ended up kicking the back of my chair (not on purpose, at least I dont think so), but it made for a very frustrating experience. Productivity was even less than the "one desk, two people" scenario described above -- after getting jostled a few times, it was necessary to go for a walk outside to vent some steam.

There were a couple that would be really helpful:
1. An implementation of zlib for the SPE architecture, with a speed comparison to the PPE. (Hopefully, the SPE is very fast...)
2. Examples of direct SPE-to-SPE streaming.

Be honest and matter-of-fact about it. Tell them the truth and hope that they are smart enough to realize how this will help the company.

You can say impressive things without lying. For instance, you can say (if it happens to be true): "I trust Linux for my home computer and all my important files." That alone means alot. Or you can say "if I were asked to place a $1000 bet on a computer OS that would run without getting infected with viruses or crashing for a whole year (while connected to the net!) I would place the bet on Linux instead of Windows."

Or, you can point out other projects/companies. For instance, according to top500.org, in 2005, 390 of the top 500 super-computers were using Linux. That means that 78% of super-computers run Linux. For instance, the world's most powerful computer is IBM Blue Gene, and it uses Linux for its I/O nodes (more info here). Also, Google's gigantic, powerful, and distributed search engine runs using over 60,000 Linux machines (more info here, here, and on Google's Research page). The fact that big, complicated, and highly successful operations use Linux shows what it can do. In the case of Google, it shows that they trust it to deliver the security they need.

You can urge them to get a second opinion. For instance, tell them to look over Secunia's report on Windows XP compared to Ubuntu 5.10.

Ultimately, however, all you can do is provide them with an honest assessment of Linux' strengths and weaknesses, and point out in what ways the media reports are wrong. If they respect your opinion, then they'll make the right choice. If they refuse to listen to reason, then there is nothing you can do. People who are more interested in media sound-bites than expert discussion are essentially impossible to convince of anything they don't already believe. Don't waste your time, and don't buy company stock.

There is such a research project at IBM. http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/research_proje cts.nsf/pages/cellcompiler.index.html

There is a free GCC compiler for Cell. And Linux. And you can get a free simulator to run it on. All at http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/power/cell

Take a peek at http://www.research.ibm.com/cell/patents_and_publi cations.html to see the patents and whitepapers for cell technology. One interesting point is the Online Game Prototype white paper on there.

No, the PowerPC processor family is a derivative of the POWER4, with some features removed and a SIMD unit added. The POWER5 is a different chip.

According to IBM: ...the PowerPC was based on POWER, but with a number of differences. ... PowerPC 900 family
The 64-bit PowerPC 970, a single-core version of the POWER4...

Seems like there IS something in common besides marketing, namely the "instruction-set architecture":

Power Architecture(TM) technology is an instruction-set architecture that spans applications from consumer electronics to supercomputers. Power Architecture encompasses PowerPC®, POWER4(TM) and POWER5(TM) processors.

See: http://www-03.ibm.com/chips/power/aboutpower/

IMHO, touchpads are the worst of the lot, if only for their position below the palms where they get constantly touched. They are also impossible to use for anything accurate, in my experience. This is probably due in part to the size of fingertips, which are not quite pointlike. A nipple mouse has none of these problems.

In fact I've considered getting one of the IBM Space Saver keyboards for my desktop, the kind with a nipple mouse and no numeric keypad.

There's plenty of info out there on Cell:

http://www.research.ibm.com/cell/

IBM's running Linux on the thing already

Call it unfortunate naming, but these two processor families don't really have much in common (other than possibly some marketing material). A POWER processor is the stuff dreams are made of. See http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/power/. A PowerPC processor is the stuff printers are made of. And until recently; Macs.

Funny how old things surface again and again as time passes. In 2001, it was estimated that this technology would be out in 2003. IBM Press release from 2001 announced this technology already.

What I've heard is that they have a development environment for the Cell processor (now released) that has at least a working compiler. If that's true, then they've already gone beyond what was available for the PlayStation 2, at least at the level of programming the Linux kit.

Craig Steffen

Since I don't see any replies with hard science yet, guess I'll give it a go. This "method of altering silicon" appears to be just a combination of multiple already-extant technologies:

1. 65nm. IBM, Intel, AMD, et al, already use this fab.
2. Strained Silicon. IBM already uses this on the G5, probably others as well.
3. SOI. AMD has been doing this since 2003.

yes i realize this is not the same thing, but it stands to reason this will be IBM's conduit for this new technology to the 0x86 world. and thus to Apple.

I work as a system designer leveraging HP-PA-RISC, IBM, Sun, and HP-win32/64 servers. I primarily work in the UNIX space, but occassionally have to purchase Windows servers. Enough background.
Prior to the UltraSPARC 4+ and the T1 processor from Sun, the Power5 core was approximately equiv to 4 UltraSPARC4 CPUs. For example, a P550 http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/p/hardware/entry/550 q/index.html with 4 cores, is roughly equiv to a V1280 with 10 CPUs. When you add up the total cost of ownership, most software packages are licensed either by core or CPU count. 4 CPU licenses are always always less costly than 10 CPU licenses.
Now the Power5+ processors (which I've already purchased almost 30 servers), feel 2x faster than a Power4. The P550Q Sun's T1000/T2000 application servers are also very impressive, but they aren't general purpose and the workload needs to match what these servers are designed to handle or you will be disapointed. OTOH, a $8k list price with appsrv performance like a $50k box is impressive (assuming that is a true number). I haven't gotten any T1-based servers http://store.sun.com/CMTemplate/CEServlet?process= SunStore&cmdViewProduct_CP&catid=141649 yet.
These servers are too new for many benchmarks outside what each vender claims. I've found IBM and Sun to be truthful in their performance for nearly available systems. They have to be since it is too easy to see where they might have lied in just a few months by checking http://www.spec.org/

Not bad. Apparently this was designed for inter-satellite communication. I wonder what distance this could go in space.

DB2 Express-C is free (as in beer).

Free (beer) DB2: http://www-306.ibm.com/software/data/db2/udb/db2ex press/

Free (beer) SQL Server: http://www.microsoft.com/sql/editions/express/defa ult.mspx

Now what?

IBM does have the free DB2 offering: http://www-306.ibm.com/software/data/db2/udb/db2ex press/download.html

POWER5 systems running Linux have beaten the best-of-breed performers in SPECweb99 by 27%, SPECsfs by 158%, and NetBench® by 55% proving the power of Linux on POWER systems. Best of all, a 4-way System p5 550 running DB2® has established leadership TPC-C benchmarks versus other Linux platforms.

On a related note, if anyone is curious how memory management library calls such as "malloc" work, you might check out my article on the subject.