I'm not the OP here but I am a thinkpad guy so I thought I'd offer my $.02. I recently upgraded from a very much battle-worn R32 to a new T510. The former was a value series but indisputably an IBM thinkpad. The latter is a Lenovo from the regular line-up. I've owned both since new, the latter of which I ordered custom-built.
What's your opinion of the new keyboards
I think the new keyboard is still great, easily better than any other on the market for a laptop. Response is great, a nice tactile feel. Keys are 95% size IIRC and no problem to type on. I type quite a bit - just finished my PhD thesis - so I probably know my keyboards better than most. I do have a couple IBM M series full-size keyboards (with trackpoint, of course) that I use for heavy-duty typing but there are times when a silent keyboard is called for and the T510 is great for that time.
My only complaint on the keyboard is that the finish leaves something to be desired. I have naturally oily skin which seems to eat the finish off fairly quick. My left mouse button, for example, looks quite a bit older than it actually is. I do keep a silicone skin on my keyboard most of the time, FWIW.
If so, any opinions as to changes in quality, keyboard or otherwise?
All in all, I would say my T510 is still a great unit. Hardware wise my only gripe is that this particular model (or any T510) doesn't have the ultrabay, and hence is limited to the system battery (though I do have the 9 cell). I can also tell you I have dropped my thinkpad from table height - while running - more than once already and that has caused absolutely no noticeable damage whatsoever to any part of the system.
Doesn't that imply that there was a mobile site before? To the best of my understanding there was never a mobile slashdot site before now - or at least, not one that worked. I also like how the "new" mobile site launches now thta BlackBerry is considered to be a marginalized niche player - I had pointed out before that slashdot would crash most Blackberries and they always made excuses for not doing anything about it. Now that BlackBerry is no longer viewed as particularly relevant they can more easily get away with continuing to ignore it.
10-15 years ago I thought I would never be able to get a "fast enough" internet connection (of course that was after 10+ years on 28.8 dial-up). But now, I am using just a basic cable modem and I can't find a good reason to upgrade my speed. Cable company calls or mails me every week or two with offers and I always turn then down. My wife and I each have a laptop and a smart phone, we also have a blu-ray player doing netflix and an ipad. Yet we never really seem to find ourselves starved for bandwidth.
I get the argument for decreasing the cost of high-speed internet access in general, but if the cause is just for more speed, I'm not sympathetic.
... then Google+ might be the only relevant social networking site. Facebook, twitter, etc, are still mostly plugged up with people taking pictures of their (coffee / cat / car) or telling you which bathroom they are using this afternoon. Google+ actually has meaningful discussions.
You shouldn't have much trouble passing the GRE; see if you can find a graduate program where you can get a master's degree. That should only take ~2 years and then you have something to show for your efforts. The CompTIA certs are a joke, the MS certs change all the time, and the rest are too poorly defined to be worth the testing fees.
I don't feel that Lenovo really changed anything too badly with the thinkpad line. Granted, I wouldn't buy a thinkpad edge, but the T series that I purchased works great. I've had it for over 2 years and the only problem I had was with a faulty shift key on my keyboard, which they resolved by sending out a new one for me to replace myself (much better IMHO than certain other vendors who would have asked me to send it to them).
I don't really see the difference between IBM thinkpad and Lenovo thinkpad as being significant.
That is how Communism will really fall in North Korea, not with bombs but through sound economics.
What decade did you write that statement in? Communism failed in North Korea in the 1990s at the latest, an argument could be made that it never really existed there at all. Just because someone calls themselves a communist doesn't mean they actually reflect communist ideals, any more so than someone who calls themselves a libertarian actually reflects liberty.
In your view, was the T. Rex primarily an active hunter, a scavenger, or somewhere in between? A variety of models have come out lately describing the possible energetics for theropods and different conclusions have been drawn as to how fast the big guys could move - or how much energy they would have to expend in order to move at a certain pace.
For a long time the primary source of money for scientific research has been the federal granting agencies (NIH, NSF, DOE in particular). All three of them are facing either budget cuts, budget stalls, or increases in their budgets that do not match inflation. This does not seem to fare well for new scientists or established ones who are looking to further their careers.
Where do you see research money coming from next? Alternately, are we looking ahead to a time where fewer people will be doing science because the funding just won't exist to pay even their meager wages any more?
Maybe instead of just bitching about it uselessly you could actually do something useful. Go here and help fix the awful slashdot code: http://slashcode.com/www.slashcode.com/
After all, it is an open source project like any other.
An open source project is an open source project, except when it isn't. Have you looked at the last release date for slashcode? Right on the page it reads
The public Slash repo has not been updated in awhile
And that is from a message dated 02:01 PM October 1st, 2009, written by someone who no longer works for slasdhot.
In other words, more than three years of changes have been made to the code since the last time it was released on that site. Making changes to that would be like suggesting new extensions to Microsoft for Windows XP.
That would be a reasonable way to frame it, if Obama framed the bills he has signed into law as "starting points". Instead he tries to sell these conservative acts as being his own creations. The regressive taxation plans that he has signed so far, he takes credit for. The massive bailout of the health insurance industry that was sold as health care "reform", he takes credit for. The bailout of wall street banks, he takes credit for. The extension of a great number of other policies that were initiated by his conservative predecessors, he takes credit for.
No president is remembered primarily for what they wanted but did not get. For every person who talks about Reagan's proposed "Star Wars Defense System" there are at least 10 who credit him for personally tearing down the Berlin Wall (often with his death-ray eyes).
Show them this lousy website and tell them that is what happens when your company propagates lousy code - your existence goes to pot and your company is sold for very little money to a larger company who also doesn't care.
You are making a critical error in your comparisons. You are comparing what Obama has said to what other presidents have done. Obama has been president for a full term now, it is time to look at what he has done.
And if you do that, you will be hard pressed to find a single bill that he has signed that would not have been signed by Reagan. Hell, Obama has even raised taxes fewer times - for a lower total percentage - than Reagan did in his first term.
Every president as a candidate says they will do various things, and each president accomplishes a varied amount of those things (one could argue Obama is distinct in how few of those he has accomplished). However if you are talking about what Reagan, Bush, Clinton, or Bush Jr did, then you need to compare it to what Obama has done. And if you do that, you'll find that he is easily the most conservative of the set. We can even go back further and add Nixon to that set and Obama is arguably more conservative than him as well.
Obama helped pass the requirement for people to buy health insurance, which while more conservative than single payer, is not conservative
How is driving customers to businesses - which are free to set their own prices to maximize profit - not conservative? It sure as hell isn't liberal or even centrist. Go all the way back to Hoover and you won't find a republican president who would not have signed that measure in particular.
Obama allowed homosexuals in the military, not a social conservative position
Bush would have had to do that in order to continue his wars. We were running out of able bodied and willing troops; it was either end DADT or start a draft.
Obama has been in favor of financial assistance for underwater mortgages
Another pro-business position as their were too many underwater mortgages for the banks to be able to take them on and make money from them.
Obama wanted a program to double American exports.
Again, pro-business. It didn't expand union powers, increase minimum wage, or do anything else that a liberal would have wanted. For that matter it is only a program, not a law. It incentivizes domestic work but does not require it.
Because they don't care about good policy, they care about their team winning.
Granted, the republicans did show in 2012 that there are actually millions of people in this country who are so partisan that they will vote for anyone with an (R) after their name, regardless of policy, just to remove someone who instead has a (D) after theirs. But the republicans already know who these people are and how to find them; they don't need sophisticated software to do that.
So indeed, they don't give a shit about policy and might well never again now that they have been boxed into a corner and forced to depend on hyper partisans rather than issue and policy voters. However this means that the Obama team really doesn't have much to worry about in terms of the possible outcome of the republicans getting their software.
I'm not sure why they are worried about that. Obama is the most conservative president the US has had in at least 30 years. If the next democratic nominee runs on the notion of continuing what he has done so far the GOP won't be able to field a candidate who is more conservative.
The bloggers are not testing the scientific method, they are testing methods that are scientific
Putting your ignorance in boldface type is amusing. The most basic promise of the scientific method is that results can be replicated by anyone with the proper equipment repeatedly and reliably
And I am sorry that you struggle so greatly to understand what I have written.
They are testing the scientific method insofar as asking whether professional and peer-reviewed scientific work actually meets this basic test.
Do you not understand the purpose of peer-review? If results that were peer-reviewed are not reproducible, that is not a failing of the scientific method itself, nor is it a failing of peer review. Peer review does not exist to validate methods as that would be quite nearly an impossible task for the majority of all scientific papers that are published currently unless the journal sent an editor to the lab that submitted said paper to rerun the work themselves - which would be so absurdly expensive that nobody would ever pay to publish. Peer review is intended to make sure that work published is scientifically rigorous and well written.
Hell, if you go back and actually read my comment - I would say re-read but it does not appear you read it successfully for a first time yet - you will find that I did say this work is important. I also said that it is not testing the scientific method itself, which is correct.
If a lot of those experiments can't be reproduced, then those methods weren't scientific to begin with.
Not necessarily. Sure, irreproducible results can be the result of shoddy, missing, or fabricated work, and unfortunately often are. There are also times when those results can come about through no fault the experimenter. If the scientist was running an overnight synthesis and was not notified that the HVAC failed for two hours starting at 3am is that his fault? Sure, he should check afterwards to make sure that the environmental conditions were properly controlled but that isn't always immediately apparent to the scientist. Similar with something like a pressure regulator or any of a number of other laboratory instruments which should be reliable though have a nasty habit of failing in interesting ways at inopportune times.
There are times when good science is done, and bad (or badly reproducible) results come out.
The bloggers are not testing the scientific method, they are testing methods that are scientific. Those are two vastly different concepts. Their work is important, but not epic.
If only it could do polycarbonates...
on
The 3D Un-Printer
·
· Score: 1
If laying off 6-10 teachers results in only saving one life, isn't that worth it?
if laying off 6-10 teachers saves one life and gives all the students in that school a subpar education, then it makes sense to consider finding an option that can save that life without sacrificing the futures of those children. Considering how far behind our education system has already fallen, it seems that we should really look into options that do not cause it to fall even further.
Slashdot Mirror
What's your opinion of the new keyboards
I think the new keyboard is still great, easily better than any other on the market for a laptop. Response is great, a nice tactile feel. Keys are 95% size IIRC and no problem to type on. I type quite a bit - just finished my PhD thesis - so I probably know my keyboards better than most. I do have a couple IBM M series full-size keyboards (with trackpoint, of course) that I use for heavy-duty typing but there are times when a silent keyboard is called for and the T510 is great for that time.
My only complaint on the keyboard is that the finish leaves something to be desired. I have naturally oily skin which seems to eat the finish off fairly quick. My left mouse button, for example, looks quite a bit older than it actually is. I do keep a silicone skin on my keyboard most of the time, FWIW.
If so, any opinions as to changes in quality, keyboard or otherwise?
All in all, I would say my T510 is still a great unit. Hardware wise my only gripe is that this particular model (or any T510) doesn't have the ultrabay, and hence is limited to the system battery (though I do have the 9 cell). I can also tell you I have dropped my thinkpad from table height - while running - more than once already and that has caused absolutely no noticeable damage whatsoever to any part of the system.
Doesn't that imply that there was a mobile site before? To the best of my understanding there was never a mobile slashdot site before now - or at least, not one that worked. I also like how the "new" mobile site launches now thta BlackBerry is considered to be a marginalized niche player - I had pointed out before that slashdot would crash most Blackberries and they always made excuses for not doing anything about it. Now that BlackBerry is no longer viewed as particularly relevant they can more easily get away with continuing to ignore it.
(and I say this as a blackberry user)
Salary information does pertain rather directly to ability to pay off debt.
10-15 years ago I thought I would never be able to get a "fast enough" internet connection (of course that was after 10+ years on 28.8 dial-up). But now, I am using just a basic cable modem and I can't find a good reason to upgrade my speed. Cable company calls or mails me every week or two with offers and I always turn then down. My wife and I each have a laptop and a smart phone, we also have a blu-ray player doing netflix and an ipad. Yet we never really seem to find ourselves starved for bandwidth.
I get the argument for decreasing the cost of high-speed internet access in general, but if the cause is just for more speed, I'm not sympathetic.
... then Google+ might be the only relevant social networking site. Facebook, twitter, etc, are still mostly plugged up with people taking pictures of their (coffee / cat / car) or telling you which bathroom they are using this afternoon. Google+ actually has meaningful discussions.
I want a >30' E-Ink picture frame with USB or WiFi
30 foot is almost Jumbotron size. Does your office really have room for something that large (to say nothing of the budget)?
You shouldn't have much trouble passing the GRE; see if you can find a graduate program where you can get a master's degree. That should only take ~2 years and then you have something to show for your efforts. The CompTIA certs are a joke, the MS certs change all the time, and the rest are too poorly defined to be worth the testing fees.
I don't feel that Lenovo really changed anything too badly with the thinkpad line. Granted, I wouldn't buy a thinkpad edge, but the T series that I purchased works great. I've had it for over 2 years and the only problem I had was with a faulty shift key on my keyboard, which they resolved by sending out a new one for me to replace myself (much better IMHO than certain other vendors who would have asked me to send it to them).
I don't really see the difference between IBM thinkpad and Lenovo thinkpad as being significant.
That is how Communism will really fall in North Korea, not with bombs but through sound economics.
What decade did you write that statement in? Communism failed in North Korea in the 1990s at the latest, an argument could be made that it never really existed there at all. Just because someone calls themselves a communist doesn't mean they actually reflect communist ideals, any more so than someone who calls themselves a libertarian actually reflects liberty.
In your view, was the T. Rex primarily an active hunter, a scavenger, or somewhere in between? A variety of models have come out lately describing the possible energetics for theropods and different conclusions have been drawn as to how fast the big guys could move - or how much energy they would have to expend in order to move at a certain pace.
For a long time the primary source of money for scientific research has been the federal granting agencies (NIH, NSF, DOE in particular). All three of them are facing either budget cuts, budget stalls, or increases in their budgets that do not match inflation. This does not seem to fare well for new scientists or established ones who are looking to further their careers.
Where do you see research money coming from next? Alternately, are we looking ahead to a time where fewer people will be doing science because the funding just won't exist to pay even their meager wages any more?
Maybe instead of just bitching about it uselessly you could actually do something useful. Go here and help fix the awful slashdot code: http://slashcode.com/www.slashcode.com/
After all, it is an open source project like any other.
An open source project is an open source project, except when it isn't. Have you looked at the last release date for slashcode? Right on the page it reads
The public Slash repo has not been updated in awhile
And that is from a message dated 02:01 PM October 1st, 2009, written by someone who no longer works for slasdhot.
In other words, more than three years of changes have been made to the code since the last time it was released on that site. Making changes to that would be like suggesting new extensions to Microsoft for Windows XP.
That would be a reasonable way to frame it, if Obama framed the bills he has signed into law as "starting points". Instead he tries to sell these conservative acts as being his own creations. The regressive taxation plans that he has signed so far, he takes credit for. The massive bailout of the health insurance industry that was sold as health care "reform", he takes credit for. The bailout of wall street banks, he takes credit for. The extension of a great number of other policies that were initiated by his conservative predecessors, he takes credit for.
No president is remembered primarily for what they wanted but did not get. For every person who talks about Reagan's proposed "Star Wars Defense System" there are at least 10 who credit him for personally tearing down the Berlin Wall (often with his death-ray eyes).
Show them this lousy website and tell them that is what happens when your company propagates lousy code - your existence goes to pot and your company is sold for very little money to a larger company who also doesn't care.
That should scare them straight.
You are making a critical error in your comparisons. You are comparing what Obama has said to what other presidents have done. Obama has been president for a full term now, it is time to look at what he has done.
And if you do that, you will be hard pressed to find a single bill that he has signed that would not have been signed by Reagan. Hell, Obama has even raised taxes fewer times - for a lower total percentage - than Reagan did in his first term.
Every president as a candidate says they will do various things, and each president accomplishes a varied amount of those things (one could argue Obama is distinct in how few of those he has accomplished). However if you are talking about what Reagan, Bush, Clinton, or Bush Jr did, then you need to compare it to what Obama has done. And if you do that, you'll find that he is easily the most conservative of the set. We can even go back further and add Nixon to that set and Obama is arguably more conservative than him as well.
Obama helped pass the requirement for people to buy health insurance, which while more conservative than single payer, is not conservative
How is driving customers to businesses - which are free to set their own prices to maximize profit - not conservative? It sure as hell isn't liberal or even centrist. Go all the way back to Hoover and you won't find a republican president who would not have signed that measure in particular.
Obama allowed homosexuals in the military, not a social conservative position
Bush would have had to do that in order to continue his wars. We were running out of able bodied and willing troops; it was either end DADT or start a draft.
Obama has been in favor of financial assistance for underwater mortgages
Another pro-business position as their were too many underwater mortgages for the banks to be able to take them on and make money from them.
Obama wanted a program to double American exports.
Again, pro-business. It didn't expand union powers, increase minimum wage, or do anything else that a liberal would have wanted. For that matter it is only a program, not a law. It incentivizes domestic work but does not require it.
Because they don't care about good policy, they care about their team winning.
Granted, the republicans did show in 2012 that there are actually millions of people in this country who are so partisan that they will vote for anyone with an (R) after their name, regardless of policy, just to remove someone who instead has a (D) after theirs. But the republicans already know who these people are and how to find them; they don't need sophisticated software to do that.
So indeed, they don't give a shit about policy and might well never again now that they have been boxed into a corner and forced to depend on hyper partisans rather than issue and policy voters. However this means that the Obama team really doesn't have much to worry about in terms of the possible outcome of the republicans getting their software.
I'm not sure why they are worried about that. Obama is the most conservative president the US has had in at least 30 years. If the next democratic nominee runs on the notion of continuing what he has done so far the GOP won't be able to field a candidate who is more conservative.
those phony programs politicians use to project government expenditures
The programs are real, even if the math may be phony.
The bloggers are not testing the scientific method, they are testing methods that are scientific
Putting your ignorance in boldface type is amusing. The most basic promise of the scientific method is that results can be replicated by anyone with the proper equipment repeatedly and reliably
And I am sorry that you struggle so greatly to understand what I have written.
They are testing the scientific method insofar as asking whether professional and peer-reviewed scientific work actually meets this basic test.
Do you not understand the purpose of peer-review? If results that were peer-reviewed are not reproducible, that is not a failing of the scientific method itself, nor is it a failing of peer review. Peer review does not exist to validate methods as that would be quite nearly an impossible task for the majority of all scientific papers that are published currently unless the journal sent an editor to the lab that submitted said paper to rerun the work themselves - which would be so absurdly expensive that nobody would ever pay to publish. Peer review is intended to make sure that work published is scientifically rigorous and well written.
Hell, if you go back and actually read my comment - I would say re-read but it does not appear you read it successfully for a first time yet - you will find that I did say this work is important. I also said that it is not testing the scientific method itself, which is correct.
they are testing methods that are scientific.
If a lot of those experiments can't be reproduced, then those methods weren't scientific to begin with.
Not necessarily. Sure, irreproducible results can be the result of shoddy, missing, or fabricated work, and unfortunately often are. There are also times when those results can come about through no fault the experimenter. If the scientist was running an overnight synthesis and was not notified that the HVAC failed for two hours starting at 3am is that his fault? Sure, he should check afterwards to make sure that the environmental conditions were properly controlled but that isn't always immediately apparent to the scientist. Similar with something like a pressure regulator or any of a number of other laboratory instruments which should be reliable though have a nasty habit of failing in interesting ways at inopportune times.
There are times when good science is done, and bad (or badly reproducible) results come out.
The bloggers are not testing the scientific method, they are testing methods that are scientific. Those are two vastly different concepts. Their work is important, but not epic.
I have a bag full of CDs that need to go away.
Hence this service which depends on it is not either.
If laying off 6-10 teachers results in only saving one life, isn't that worth it?
if laying off 6-10 teachers saves one life and gives all the students in that school a subpar education, then it makes sense to consider finding an option that can save that life without sacrificing the futures of those children. Considering how far behind our education system has already fallen, it seems that we should really look into options that do not cause it to fall even further.