Slashdot Mirror

I own a Thinkpad, and I recall reading this blog entry:

http://www.lenovoblogs.com/insidethebox/2007/01/thinkpad-power-manager/

In which a software developer at IBM/Lenovo moans about how the software he works on is treated as "junk in the preload." You kinda feel bad for the guy, and he makes a convincing argument that there are proprietary features in LiIon batteries that really could tell you more if you had the software to go with it.

So I go and re-enable the Lenovo Power Manager at startup... and my RAM usage increases by FIVE HUNDRED MEGS! A half gig for a battery readout! Unbelievable! I wanted so badly to throttle the guy that wrote that blog post for not mentioning that critical failure of his crap software that IS junk and DESERVES the removal he whines about.

(For the skeptical, I measured the memory of the app in a few different ways because it just seemed impossible... I got between 501mb and 513mb every which way.)

Point being, there is some small legitimate purpose to this kind of software - but there needs to be some sort of pressure on them to be efficient and either useful or not present. I blame PC review websites. Their reviews are so far off and focused on barely-relevant details that I wonder how many of them are paid for by the manufacturer.

A strong review site that's free to read would make an impact, and a tool that cleans things out that you can trust (perhaps on said review site) would help too - you could offer manufacturers the opportunity to be removed from the "cleanup" list if they get within certain metrics.

Lenovo has been playing with keyboard configurations for a while. And its VP of design commented on removing the caps lock key a long time ago.

If this change is indicative of what'll happen to the "serious business" series (T, X, R), then the ThinkPad has, after some 18 years or so, finally jumped the shark.

One of the main selling points of a ThinkPad was the keyboard. When all the other brands went completely nuts and placed the PrtSc/ScrLk/Pause/Insert/Delete/Home/End/PgUp and PgDn keys at a whim, on a ThinkPad you could blindly hit the spot where the key was supposed to be and actually hit it. They were quite proud of that, and nobody minded.
Now, you get a chiclet keyboard with the F-keys disabled by default and six rows. Well, congrats Lenovo, you've just went from top-of-the-line in 2010 to consumer-grade-sony-vaio in 1999 or so.

Another thing were the displays. Great, high-resolution, matte 4:3 screens one could work with. I own a 12" X61 with 1050 horizontal lines. Nowadays, it's WXGA with less than 800 lines in everything up to 14.1", and half of the models come in glare-type finish. Thanks to the shiny finish you can't see the screen contents anyways, so that slightly mitigates the lack of resolution.

What's next, Lenovo? Get rid of the high-quality finish of the Notebooks and switch to cheap plastic? Fuck up the support infrastructure IBM built? Oh wait, already happened. I guess it's down to the nipple mouse as the last true hallmark of a ThinkPad. And that, I won't give up 'til you pry it from my cold, dead hands.

If this change is indicative of what'll happen to the "serious business" series (T, X, R), then the ThinkPad has, after some 18 years or so, finally jumped the shark.

One of the main selling points of a ThinkPad was the keyboard. When all the other brands went completely nuts and placed the PrtSc/ScrLk/Pause/Insert/Delete/Home/End/PgUp and PgDn keys at a whim, on a ThinkPad you could blindly hit the spot where the key was supposed to be and actually hit it. They were quite proud of that, and nobody minded.
Now, you get a chiclet keyboard with the F-keys disabled by default and six rows. Well, congrats Lenovo, you've just went from top-of-the-line in 2010 to consumer-grade-sony-vaio in 1999 or so.

Another thing were the displays. Great, high-resolution, matte 4:3 screens one could work with. I own a 12" X61 with 1050 horizontal lines. Nowadays, it's WXGA with less than 800 lines in everything up to 14.1", and half of the models come in glare-type finish. Thanks to the shiny finish you can't see the screen contents anyways, so that slightly mitigates the lack of resolution.

What's next, Lenovo? Get rid of the high-quality finish of the Notebooks and switch to cheap plastic? Fuck up the support infrastructure IBM built? Oh wait, already happened. I guess it's down to the nipple mouse as the last true hallmark of a ThinkPad. And that, I won't give up 'til you pry it from my cold, dead hands.

The single best laptop ever made.

http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=2864

Pros:

• IPS display gives you nearly 180 degrees viewing angle -- no more of the annoying color shifts or inversion when looking at the screen off-axis
• Native 1600x1200 resolution in a 15" form-factor. Wide-screen displays are teh suck for coding. The T60p's "standard" display ratio and absolutely insane resolution means you can fit dozens of lines of code per page. Combine this with the beautiful IPS technology, and you have tiny-ass, legible fonts. A godsend for coding.
• 15" form factor-- pretty-much the best trade-off for "I need to read lots of code" and "I don't want to lug around a lot of weight." Additionally, the T60p is (like most ThinkPads) all modular. So you can leave out the optical drive and put in another battery if you like (giving you 7+ hours of battery life).
• ThinkPads are the greatest Linux-friendly laptops in the world.
• The processor/RAM combination is perfectly adequate (i.e., not some underpowered piece of shit)

The only drawback to the T60p is that they are discontinued, and Lenovo no longer carries the IPS LCD. Why not? Because the suppliers realized they could make more money using the technology to build TVs than replacement screens for laptops. More information from a Lenovo insider. And if the suppliers aren't making them, Lenovo can't sell them. Simple as that. You can still find them (rarely) on eBay, but they are some of the most price-drop-resilient laptops ever made.

This blog post has actual footage of the new keyboard:

http://lenovoblogs.com/designmatters/?p=1489

Straight from Lenovo: http://lenovoblogs.com/designmatters/?p=1565

This guy has been blogigng his anti-Linux views since at least 2007. Most amusing from the blog is that a Lenovo VP comments on his blog that he is full of sh*t.

This guy has been blogigng his anti-Linux views since at least 2007. Most amusing from the blog is that a Lenovo VP comments on his blog that he is full of sh*t.

The Lenovo laptops running Vista with two graphics cards can switch completely on the fly. It's a bit disappointing that Apple, with full control over everything, couldn't manage the same. See http://lenovoblogs.com/insidethebox/?p=154.

Someone didn't get the memo about the poll on a lenovo blog asking the public what distro they wanted. http://lenovoblogs.com/insidethebox/?p=98&dem_action=view&dem_poll_id=2 Ubuntu got 25,266 votes or 37% of the votes, while Suse got 2,045 or 3% and OpenSuse got 1,528 or just 2%. SLED got just over 300 votes. They asked the public answered and they still go with a distro with lukewarm results. Wasn't it bound to happen?

The article states nothing new - there are two very interesting blogs from Lenovo which already stated the same in August 07 (!). To quote:

Solid state HDDs promise to save power compared to traditional hard disk technology. And they will. However today's generation of SSDs have no power savings benefit compared to traditional HDDs. The big reason is that current SSDs with a Serial ATA interface are actually Parallel ATA hard disk drives with a serial bridge chip. They don't offer support for low power interface states and the architecture has a potential for data-losing error conditions when recovering from a low power state like suspend or hibernate. In the future, there will be native SATA solutions which will solve many of these problems and will at the same time offer a real power savings benefit which should increase battery life.[1]

An updated quote from a newer blog:

Power Consumption - All SSDs are going to save you battery life on your notebook, but some will save you more than others. Again, the native SATA drives will give you better battery life.[2]

To summarise: old news and mostly outdated with very recent SSD drives.

[1]: SSD part 1 (Aug 07)

[2]: SSD part 2 (March 08)

The article states nothing new - there are two very interesting blogs from Lenovo which already stated the same in August 07 (!). To quote:

Solid state HDDs promise to save power compared to traditional hard disk technology. And they will. However today's generation of SSDs have no power savings benefit compared to traditional HDDs. The big reason is that current SSDs with a Serial ATA interface are actually Parallel ATA hard disk drives with a serial bridge chip. They don't offer support for low power interface states and the architecture has a potential for data-losing error conditions when recovering from a low power state like suspend or hibernate. In the future, there will be native SATA solutions which will solve many of these problems and will at the same time offer a real power savings benefit which should increase battery life.[1]

An updated quote from a newer blog:

Power Consumption - All SSDs are going to save you battery life on your notebook, but some will save you more than others. Again, the native SATA drives will give you better battery life.[2]

To summarise: old news and mostly outdated with very recent SSD drives.

[1]: SSD part 1 (Aug 07)

[2]: SSD part 2 (March 08)

• "Of course, a feature like face recognition invites play, and what better way to play than to try and fool the software.

  First up was an 8 x 10 color glossy photograph of yours truly (with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back). No matter how I held the photograph, no matter whether the security settings were set high or at their lowest setting, no matter what angle I held the photo, I was not able to use it to log onto the system. The result was exactly what I had expected - that the software was smart enough to distinguish a face from a picture of a face."

• "Depending on the software used, face recognition uses multiple techniques to identify a person's face. Some of the more advanced programs use texture mapping in which a person's skin texture is analyzed and matched. Most however, define nodal points on a person's face and then use software to mathematically represent those points. Things measured include distance between the eyes, width of the nose, length of the jaw line, or shape of the cheekbones. Together these concatenate a numerical code which is stored in a database for later retrieval.

  One particular aspect of the software Lenovo uses is rather freaky. When you sit down in front of the camera, the system generates two white dots that follow your eyes. Of course, this is completely harmless and is nothing more than a few white pixels shown on screen."

Why isn't this kind of "security" generally laughed at by the consumers?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LA4Xx5Noxyo http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/05/16/gummi_bears_defeat_fingerprint_sensors/

• Can fingerprint readers be fooled by hackers?

  There are a number of known attacks against fingerprint readers. Some are rather intricate, such as building a fake finger out of something like ballistic gel or soft plastic. Currently, there are no known attacks against capacitive slide technology, which is what our Fingerprint Reader offerings are based on. The sensor manufacturers keep on top of these attacks and continually update their devices to resist them.

http://lenovoblogs.com/insidethebox/?p=141

From the above article : "Also ask if the drive is a native SATA implementation or a parallel drive with a SATA bridge chip. You want the native SATA implementation. Theyre better in all aspects."

Apple uses the bridge chip, Lenovo uses the native implementation. I'm sure this would be a factor in their results.

Disclaimer: I shelled out a fortune for a Lenovo x300 with a SSD.

At http://lenovoblogs.com/insidethebox/?p=141 the Lenovo folks detail what goes in behind the scenes with the SSDs. They even detail why the (more recent) drives they use are better than the same brand (but older technology) used in the Macbook Air.

This is an interesting post, FWIW... I know it's on Lenovo's blogs, but...

http://lenovoblogs.com/insidethebox/?p=93

1. Where's the link to a current press release from Lenovo or from Novell/SuSE? The article doesn't share any links, and when I looked on both companies' sites all I could find were old press releases.

2. Why SuSE? Did Lenovo somehow broker an unbeatable deal on support contracts, or... ?

While googling for more news on the current development, I found an old Lenovo blog entry from September of 2007 asking "What Linux distribution would you most like to see supported on a ThinkPad?". Now I'm sure that every kind of online poll has some amount of ballot-stuffing, but out of the 64572 responses, 37% chose Ubuntu, 17% chose Mandrivia, and (much farther down the list) a mere 5% chose SuSE, SLED, or OpenSuSE. SLED got only 312 votes, giving it less than 0.5% of the votes.

As unscientific as the poll was, the author of the blog admitted in the lead-up to the poll that he figured that he needed to try out Ubuntu and that he was pretty sure what linux distribution was going to be chosen. So with all this user interest in Ubuntu, why did Lenovo go the Novell/SuSE route?

Oh well -- as long as the Thinkpad hardware is fully supported by some modern Linux distro, I figure that Ubuntu should have no problems supporting it.

Most laptops don't. (from http://lenovoblogs.com/insidethebox/?p=88)

You may also try Mandriva, it's the second distro most voted in a recent lenovo sponsored poll after Ubuntu. I've been using it for years and it's a great distro, the 2007.1 repositories for 64 bits are really a big bonus.

Their carbon fiber reinforced plastic cases are tough as hell, active protection system and motherboard roll cage seems to keep them ticking long after most cheep plastic machines kicking arround today would be in peices imo

This lenovo blog article should interest you ThinkPads are Ruggedized Machines :o)

Heise benchmarked with 64bit-Linux.

I forgot to include the link to where I referenced the battery life http://www.lenovoblogs.com/insidethebox/?p=40