This supports their notion that Cheerios have a large amount of natural ingredients. If Cheerios were mostly artificial they wouldn't likely grow much of anything. It would be interesting to try Cheerios vs store brand, regular vs honey-nut (or other varieties) and see how they do.
If you haven't been fucked by your insurance company yet,[...]; you can't win or even hope to break even.
Well, while you probably didn't have any say in being born in America, you (probably, criminal record and skills permitting) have the option of leaving to live in the civilized world somewhere. Maybe the Canadians would accept you?
As someone who has looked into doing exactly that, I can tell you that is actually a lot more difficult than what some want us to believe it to be. If you are an American and you want to move to Canada, you need to have a job offer first, and then you still need to take the entrance exam to determine if you will be allowed to emigrate. You can't just simply drive across the border and start looking for work. Furthermore there is little (if any) incentive for Canadian employers to hire Americans; you have to be a really truly exceptional applicant for a very highly skilled position in order for the employer to be able to justify hiring you.
I'm not sure where the free world is, but Americans are generally not welcomed in it.
Ever seen a forklift? I'm not sure why it's not already a "thing"
Because a forklift isn't particularly quick, and it isn't particularly elegant either. The electric car companies want everything about their cars to come across as futuristic, and there is nothing futuristic about a forklift. Equally as much, how would you get a forklift to remove a large battery pack in a sufficiently precise manner as to be able to make it safely disconnect the old pack and reconnect the new one?
Not only that, but it would be a huge marketing opportunity. The owners of the cars would pay monthly for the life of the car to get battery swaps.
I expect we will see that soon. They just need to figure out a way to make it fast and as fool proof as possible. I expect Tesla and others have had engineers working on this for some time, to reach a point where a car will pull into a service station and the battery pack will be automatically extracted and replaced in the same amount of time it takes to fill a 20 gallon gas tank.
Roadside assistance could even show up and swap batteries with you if your car died somewhere.
That I expect would be a different problem due to the weight of the battery pack. AAA sometimes can't even change a tire for a motorist because of how heavy some wheel and tire combinations are; doing a battery pack is likely out of the question. I expect they'll either do some sort of rapid mobile partial-charging solution or a serial "auxiliary battery" connection for this once there are enough electric cars on the road to make them economically sensible.
I'm not saying that isn't possible, but given the amount of work involved wouldn't be a lot easier to swap out batteries like you do propane tanks on your gas grill?
I expect that formula e racing will eventually come up with a solution for that. Right now for a race they swap out cars but in order to make it more comparable to formula 1 racing they will want to go towards swapping out batteries instead. Once they figure out a fast and safe way to swap out battery packs we will see the technology quickly trickle down to Tesla and other electric cars. Then it will be a lot like swapping out a propane tank, you'll likely go in and pay for a charged replacement pack that will be quickly swapped at a local station.
While English is the official language at conferences I attend in my field, German is one of the next most spoken (likely after Mandarin Chinese and slightly ahead of, or even with, Russian). A lot of the top PIs in my field speak it as their first language as well, which makes it a very valuable negotiation tool.
is just making something up that would support his pet conspiracy theory, if it were true.
If you haven't been fucked by your insurance company yet, just wait until you're a bit older. I can guarantee you it will happen, it is only a matter of when and how badly. This is not a conspiracy theory, this is a guarantee. They hold all the cards and they set the rules of the game; you can't win or even hope to break even.
In the US, the people in charge are still the health insurance companies. They will call the shots during this situation just as they have for decades (including during the writing of the 2010 "health care reform" bill). They will dictate who gets which care, and who gets to die in which ways. The 26 year old nurse in TX has probably already had her policy cancelled for a pre-existing condition (ie, she was alive and hence had the potential to be infected with ebola in her hazardous occupation).
Just wait until the insurance companies quietly release their 2014 profit reports in another year or two and we see how handsomely we rewarded their top executives for this.
In the same way that youtube is an effective way to fight ISIS, I suppose.
we can't eliminate all sources of profit for spammers, there will always be gullible people out there, so spam filters is one solution.
Cutting spammers off from their profit isn't about stopping sales; you are too late at that point. Spamvertised domains leave a distinct money trail, with many opportunities to disrupt money flow along the way. Those are where you disrupt the cash flow to prevent the spammers from getting paid. This has been demonstrated to work, unlike spam filters which only end up increasing the global volume of spam.
They won't get paid if people don't see their messages due to filtering. That's why filtering is a good thing.
Except that they will keep finding ways to get around the filters. Which makes for more wasted time on adjusting the filters. Which means that the filters are not solving the problem but just creating a new one.
The spammers don't care in the least if 99.99% of the spam they send out gets filtered, as.001% of 1 billion is still 1 million. And if only.001% of the 1 million who receive the spam actually buy something, that is still 1,000 sales which is a great return considering the investment is so minimal.
In other words, when we use filters, we lose. The people who filter their email aren't the customers the spammers are after anyways, they are just collateral damage.
Catching spam and filtering it is the wrong way to deal with the spam problem. At that point the spam has already been sent, already taken up storage and CPU time somewhere, and already cost you money (yes, even with a "free" email account like gmail it still costs money somewhere). And if you add in the costs of filters, with the admin time and storage they consume, it is even worse.
As I have said many times before, the only effective way to deal with spam is to approach it from an economic angle, as spam is an economic problem. Spam isn't sent out to piss you off, it is sent to make money. The spammers don't need you personally to buy anything, they just need someone else to buy something. The ROI on spam is incredible as the cost is almost nothing to send to billions of addresses, and only a couple of suckers are required in order to make money off the venture.
If you want to actually help end the spam epidemic, stop talking about filters and other crappy "solutions" that only accelerate the arms race with the spammers. The way to stop spam is to remove the profit motive. This has been done successfully already; if you can prevent the spammers from getting paid they won't send spam because it won't be worth their time. Groups have succeeded in this and the effect has been dramatic. By contrast filters just encourage spammers to employ more creative measures to get their messages through - many of which result in reducing the S:N ratio of filters.
It took a little while, but I knew we could count on him to promote another "look at the silly liberals" article to the front page. It had been almost a full week, so he was clearly due.
The cult of Elon Musk is not even remotely close to as devoted as the cult of Ron Paul. When Musk's followers declare their willingness to trumpet very average "accomplishments" as being earth-shattering - and to lay down their own lives to further his ambitions - then he will have an impressive modern cult. Until then he's just a rookie.
Don't forget that a lot of people there have decent CS and maths education, but less than optimal employment opportunities.
You're absolutely right.
Add to that a dim view of government in general
If by general, you mean government anywhere, I would agree with that. A lot of the CS and math guys from over there came out with a general attitude of unlimited cynicism towards any government. As for their own government I would say the guys we're talking about here likely see their own government as being a non-issue in their enterprise. Hell, one of the top spammers from Russia wasn't busted until we found out he had a sex dungeon full of young an disabled children in his basement. Eventually it seems he felt so far above the law to not even bother trying to hide from it.
Of course the top cyber criminals are from former soviet bloc countries. That's where the top spammers have resided for a long time as well, and there is a lot of overlap between the two sets. While in the US we don't have anti-spam laws that mean anything, in those countries the people tasked with enforcing the laws are openly accepting bribes from people who violate them.
This really should have been included in the summary:
Each of the three versions of the Model S will come as a D model. The price of the 60kWh battery model will go from $71,070 to $75,070 for the dual motor system. The 85 kWh car goes from $81,070 to $85,070, and the P85 jumps from $105,570 to $120,170.
No indication in this article if you can get the adaptive cruise control and other fun high-tech add-ons that come with the "D" (dual motor) version without paying for the D upgrade.
If you're trying to get slashdot to finally deal with some of their old bugs, I'm not sure that shaming them on their own front page is the way to do it. Granted, the exodus of users hasn't done it, either...
Unsurprisingly, none of my colleagues wanted to be in the office with me while I was doing that. They bought me a "modern" IBM keyboard with a touchpad, USB ports, etc earlier while I was in grad school but it wasn't the same - and it died before thesis writing began - so I ended up going back to a model M when it came time to really truly be productive.
I now have two model M's with trackpoint, and USB adapters for both. They work on everything, including killing varmints or zombies.
Even if you feel that funding for scientific research shouldn't grow to at least meet inflation (and NIH funding hasn't grown to match inflation in many years now), there is still a problem in the funding of scientific research in the US. The big problem here comes down to how funding mechanisms pay for people who actually DO research. Grants are, more often than not, structured around the very meager pay that we have for graduate students. Faculty and other Principal Investigators (PIs) often have no choice but to hire grad students as they are the only people they can afford to hire - or are allowed to hire - under the terms of the grant.
However, PIs are not allowed to keep their grad students forever, either. Those grad students have to be let go (preferably with PhD in hand) at some point; it doesn't look good for anyone to keep a grad student around too long.
The idea of establishing a new rank of "senior scientist" - with common understanding of what it entails and a livable wage to go with it - is a great one. The problem is figuring out a way to pay those senior scientists.
That said, i don't have any pity for someone in their late 20s on their second postdoc. I know plenty of people in their mid-30s who are only on their first.
to be fair, admitting that science is real IS a liberal position. thus, the supposedly liberal editors fulfill their quota just by not denying reality.
whereas the equivalent from the supposedly conservative editors would be an article about how "of course they think science is real, because their jobs depend on it!"
I'd give you a (+1, insightful) if I had mod points, but I've been on the no-mod-points-for-this-guy list for years now.
imho, it goes to false equivalence...the idea that to be fair you have to give each side "equal time" by having 3 'liberal' and 3 'conservative' leaning major contributors...that's a guess but it appears that way when reading slashdot
That might be true if the "liberal" editors actually posted liberal stories to the front page with anywhere near as much of the frequency that we see the conservative editors posting conservative FUD to the front page.
rarely is it this blatant..
Look through what samzenpus posts to the front page, he does this kind of shit all the time he posted complete and utter conservative FUD a few weeks ago that was on this level of blatant FUD-ness, but he sneaks in little partisan barbs on a high frequency in general. If he is on staff to bring out conservative eyeballs, he is doing a good job. If he is on staff to actually be an intelligent editor and reviewer or news, he is a total failure.
but i still think slashdot is good and relevant even though sometimes we see stuff like this story
This shit should happen a lot less often, or even better not at all.
It didn't take long for him to reach to the bottom of the barrel on this one to scare up conservative excitement. Samzenpus, you made it almost a full week without going there - how does it feel?
I find it amusing to see how hard some people will work to try to compromise my inconsequential system.
These are automated attack that scan whole ip range.
i am well aware that there is nothing special about my system being targeted. I don't pretend that my system harbors great secrets of immense value to the Chinese. Indeed they would probably use my system to try to compromise other open systems.
Just use a rate limiting firewall like everyone else, the only down side is that you may not be able to brag about large numbers
Has it occurred to you that maybe I find this interesting? Sure there are solutions to it, and many of them. I know I can solve this problem if I want but I actually rather enjoy watching it take place. it's rather like watching an animal repeatedly try for a bit of food that was intentionally placed just out of reach; how long until it gives up?
OS/2 their marketing was horrible, they had an opportunity with Windows 3.1 lagging for too long, but they made a stupid commercial that the public didn't even know what it was about. And they let Microsoft make Windows 95 seem like what Windows 7 is. (and cost hundreds of dollars less)
I agree that OS/2 represented one of the greatest marketing screw-ups in the history of marketing. They should have eaten Microsoft's lunch with OS/2 but instead found themselves on the outside looking in. IIRC they tried the brilliant slogan of "I just totally warped my computer!" which a lot of people had a hard time comprehending to be a good thing.
It was, nonetheless, an excellent product for its time. IIRC it was still running on ATMs and other embedded platforms not too long ago.
The PowerPC line, They were doing good until the Gigahertz range was common in Intel, Power PC was still in MHZ. Intel started to make much faster chips and PowerPC couldn't get caught up.
I think they could have saved this without breaking their necks for GHz. That said, they did pull off quite a feat when they had all three of the current-generation home gaming consoles running on PowerPC or PowerPC-derived CPUs. The CPUs were able to to great things at lower clock speeds, but once again IBM was failed - at least in part - by wholly inept marketing.
Lexmark Printers, I hated repairing those guys used by Banks and other IBM shops, they in general were hard to maintain.
Maintenance wasn't great, but they brought some important technologies to the consumer.
DeskStar hard drives. They weret nicknamed DeathStar hard drives for a reason.
I would say this was yet another case of IBM collapsing under failures of bad marketing. They had one generation of drives that went down badly, and ended up giving up the whole shooting match as a result. DeskStars on either side of the "DeathStar" generation were excellent, I owned many over the years. There is a reason why Hitachi kept the DeskStar name going after buying it from IBM, it represented quality hard drives (excluding one awful generation).
x86 Servers. Why go with IBM when everyone else had one as well.
From my experience it was worth it to get an IBM server due to ease of maintenance and better service contract terms.
The ThinkPad was good.
A lot of people will tell you it still is, even under Lenovo. I'm using a Lenovo ThinkPad right now and it's doing as well as the IBM ThinkPad it replaced. I haven't tried out the Lenovo warranty yet, though.
Slashdot Mirror
This supports their notion that Cheerios have a large amount of natural ingredients. If Cheerios were mostly artificial they wouldn't likely grow much of anything. It would be interesting to try Cheerios vs store brand, regular vs honey-nut (or other varieties) and see how they do.
If you haven't been fucked by your insurance company yet,[...]; you can't win or even hope to break even.
Well, while you probably didn't have any say in being born in America, you (probably, criminal record and skills permitting) have the option of leaving to live in the civilized world somewhere. Maybe the Canadians would accept you?
As someone who has looked into doing exactly that, I can tell you that is actually a lot more difficult than what some want us to believe it to be. If you are an American and you want to move to Canada, you need to have a job offer first, and then you still need to take the entrance exam to determine if you will be allowed to emigrate. You can't just simply drive across the border and start looking for work. Furthermore there is little (if any) incentive for Canadian employers to hire Americans; you have to be a really truly exceptional applicant for a very highly skilled position in order for the employer to be able to justify hiring you.
I'm not sure where the free world is, but Americans are generally not welcomed in it.
Ever seen a forklift? I'm not sure why it's not already a "thing"
Because a forklift isn't particularly quick, and it isn't particularly elegant either. The electric car companies want everything about their cars to come across as futuristic, and there is nothing futuristic about a forklift. Equally as much, how would you get a forklift to remove a large battery pack in a sufficiently precise manner as to be able to make it safely disconnect the old pack and reconnect the new one?
Not only that, but it would be a huge marketing opportunity. The owners of the cars would pay monthly for the life of the car to get battery swaps.
I expect we will see that soon. They just need to figure out a way to make it fast and as fool proof as possible. I expect Tesla and others have had engineers working on this for some time, to reach a point where a car will pull into a service station and the battery pack will be automatically extracted and replaced in the same amount of time it takes to fill a 20 gallon gas tank.
Roadside assistance could even show up and swap batteries with you if your car died somewhere.
That I expect would be a different problem due to the weight of the battery pack. AAA sometimes can't even change a tire for a motorist because of how heavy some wheel and tire combinations are; doing a battery pack is likely out of the question. I expect they'll either do some sort of rapid mobile partial-charging solution or a serial "auxiliary battery" connection for this once there are enough electric cars on the road to make them economically sensible.
I'm not saying that isn't possible, but given the amount of work involved wouldn't be a lot easier to swap out batteries like you do propane tanks on your gas grill?
I expect that formula e racing will eventually come up with a solution for that. Right now for a race they swap out cars but in order to make it more comparable to formula 1 racing they will want to go towards swapping out batteries instead. Once they figure out a fast and safe way to swap out battery packs we will see the technology quickly trickle down to Tesla and other electric cars. Then it will be a lot like swapping out a propane tank, you'll likely go in and pay for a charged replacement pack that will be quickly swapped at a local station.
While English is the official language at conferences I attend in my field, German is one of the next most spoken (likely after Mandarin Chinese and slightly ahead of, or even with, Russian). A lot of the top PIs in my field speak it as their first language as well, which makes it a very valuable negotiation tool.
is just making something up that would support his pet conspiracy theory, if it were true.
If you haven't been fucked by your insurance company yet, just wait until you're a bit older. I can guarantee you it will happen, it is only a matter of when and how badly. This is not a conspiracy theory, this is a guarantee. They hold all the cards and they set the rules of the game; you can't win or even hope to break even.
In the US, the people in charge are still the health insurance companies. They will call the shots during this situation just as they have for decades (including during the writing of the 2010 "health care reform" bill). They will dictate who gets which care, and who gets to die in which ways. The 26 year old nurse in TX has probably already had her policy cancelled for a pre-existing condition (ie, she was alive and hence had the potential to be infected with ebola in her hazardous occupation).
Just wait until the insurance companies quietly release their 2014 profit reports in another year or two and we see how handsomely we rewarded their top executives for this.
Spam filters are just another way to fight spam
In the same way that youtube is an effective way to fight ISIS, I suppose.
we can't eliminate all sources of profit for spammers, there will always be gullible people out there, so spam filters is one solution.
Cutting spammers off from their profit isn't about stopping sales; you are too late at that point. Spamvertised domains leave a distinct money trail, with many opportunities to disrupt money flow along the way. Those are where you disrupt the cash flow to prevent the spammers from getting paid. This has been demonstrated to work, unlike spam filters which only end up increasing the global volume of spam.
They won't get paid if people don't see their messages due to filtering. That's why filtering is a good thing.
Except that they will keep finding ways to get around the filters. Which makes for more wasted time on adjusting the filters. Which means that the filters are not solving the problem but just creating a new one.
.001% of 1 billion is still 1 million. And if only .001% of the 1 million who receive the spam actually buy something, that is still 1,000 sales which is a great return considering the investment is so minimal.
The spammers don't care in the least if 99.99% of the spam they send out gets filtered, as
In other words, when we use filters, we lose. The people who filter their email aren't the customers the spammers are after anyways, they are just collateral damage.
Catching spam and filtering it is the wrong way to deal with the spam problem. At that point the spam has already been sent, already taken up storage and CPU time somewhere, and already cost you money (yes, even with a "free" email account like gmail it still costs money somewhere). And if you add in the costs of filters, with the admin time and storage they consume, it is even worse.
As I have said many times before, the only effective way to deal with spam is to approach it from an economic angle, as spam is an economic problem. Spam isn't sent out to piss you off, it is sent to make money. The spammers don't need you personally to buy anything, they just need someone else to buy something. The ROI on spam is incredible as the cost is almost nothing to send to billions of addresses, and only a couple of suckers are required in order to make money off the venture.
If you want to actually help end the spam epidemic, stop talking about filters and other crappy "solutions" that only accelerate the arms race with the spammers. The way to stop spam is to remove the profit motive. This has been done successfully already; if you can prevent the spammers from getting paid they won't send spam because it won't be worth their time. Groups have succeeded in this and the effect has been dramatic. By contrast filters just encourage spammers to employ more creative measures to get their messages through - many of which result in reducing the S:N ratio of filters.
It took a little while, but I knew we could count on him to promote another "look at the silly liberals" article to the front page. It had been almost a full week, so he was clearly due.
The cult of Elon Musk is not even remotely close to as devoted as the cult of Ron Paul. When Musk's followers declare their willingness to trumpet very average "accomplishments" as being earth-shattering - and to lay down their own lives to further his ambitions - then he will have an impressive modern cult. Until then he's just a rookie.
Don't forget that a lot of people there have decent CS and maths education, but less than optimal employment opportunities.
You're absolutely right.
Add to that a dim view of government in general
If by general, you mean government anywhere, I would agree with that. A lot of the CS and math guys from over there came out with a general attitude of unlimited cynicism towards any government. As for their own government I would say the guys we're talking about here likely see their own government as being a non-issue in their enterprise. Hell, one of the top spammers from Russia wasn't busted until we found out he had a sex dungeon full of young an disabled children in his basement. Eventually it seems he felt so far above the law to not even bother trying to hide from it.
Of course the top cyber criminals are from former soviet bloc countries. That's where the top spammers have resided for a long time as well, and there is a lot of overlap between the two sets. While in the US we don't have anti-spam laws that mean anything, in those countries the people tasked with enforcing the laws are openly accepting bribes from people who violate them.
Each of the three versions of the Model S will come as a D model. The price of the 60kWh battery model will go from $71,070 to $75,070 for the dual motor system. The 85 kWh car goes from $81,070 to $85,070, and the P85 jumps from $105,570 to $120,170.
No indication in this article if you can get the adaptive cruise control and other fun high-tech add-ons that come with the "D" (dual motor) version without paying for the D upgrade.
If you're trying to get slashdot to finally deal with some of their old bugs, I'm not sure that shaming them on their own front page is the way to do it. Granted, the exodus of users hasn't done it, either...
Unsurprisingly, none of my colleagues wanted to be in the office with me while I was doing that. They bought me a "modern" IBM keyboard with a touchpad, USB ports, etc earlier while I was in grad school but it wasn't the same - and it died before thesis writing began - so I ended up going back to a model M when it came time to really truly be productive.
I now have two model M's with trackpoint, and USB adapters for both. They work on everything, including killing varmints or zombies.
Even if you feel that funding for scientific research shouldn't grow to at least meet inflation (and NIH funding hasn't grown to match inflation in many years now), there is still a problem in the funding of scientific research in the US. The big problem here comes down to how funding mechanisms pay for people who actually DO research. Grants are, more often than not, structured around the very meager pay that we have for graduate students. Faculty and other Principal Investigators (PIs) often have no choice but to hire grad students as they are the only people they can afford to hire - or are allowed to hire - under the terms of the grant.
However, PIs are not allowed to keep their grad students forever, either. Those grad students have to be let go (preferably with PhD in hand) at some point; it doesn't look good for anyone to keep a grad student around too long.
The idea of establishing a new rank of "senior scientist" - with common understanding of what it entails and a livable wage to go with it - is a great one. The problem is figuring out a way to pay those senior scientists.
That said, i don't have any pity for someone in their late 20s on their second postdoc. I know plenty of people in their mid-30s who are only on their first.
to be fair, admitting that science is real IS a liberal position. thus, the supposedly liberal editors fulfill their quota just by not denying reality.
whereas the equivalent from the supposedly conservative editors would be an article about how "of course they think science is real, because their jobs depend on it!"
I'd give you a (+1, insightful) if I had mod points, but I've been on the no-mod-points-for-this-guy list for years now.
imho, it goes to false equivalence...the idea that to be fair you have to give each side "equal time" by having 3 'liberal' and 3 'conservative' leaning major contributors...that's a guess but it appears that way when reading slashdot
That might be true if the "liberal" editors actually posted liberal stories to the front page with anywhere near as much of the frequency that we see the conservative editors posting conservative FUD to the front page.
rarely is it this blatant..
Look through what samzenpus posts to the front page, he does this kind of shit all the time he posted complete and utter conservative FUD a few weeks ago that was on this level of blatant FUD-ness, but he sneaks in little partisan barbs on a high frequency in general. If he is on staff to bring out conservative eyeballs, he is doing a good job. If he is on staff to actually be an intelligent editor and reviewer or news, he is a total failure.
but i still think slashdot is good and relevant even though sometimes we see stuff like this story
This shit should happen a lot less often, or even better not at all.
It didn't take long for him to reach to the bottom of the barrel on this one to scare up conservative excitement. Samzenpus, you made it almost a full week without going there - how does it feel?
I find it amusing to see how hard some people will work to try to compromise my inconsequential system.
These are automated attack that scan whole ip range.
i am well aware that there is nothing special about my system being targeted. I don't pretend that my system harbors great secrets of immense value to the Chinese. Indeed they would probably use my system to try to compromise other open systems.
Just use a rate limiting firewall like everyone else, the only down side is that you may not be able to brag about large numbers
Has it occurred to you that maybe I find this interesting? Sure there are solutions to it, and many of them. I know I can solve this problem if I want but I actually rather enjoy watching it take place. it's rather like watching an animal repeatedly try for a bit of food that was intentionally placed just out of reach; how long until it gives up?
The NFL also gets nonprofit status on top of this. Could we do more to support them?
One improved productivity, the other flushed it down the toilet. Why did we reward the latter so much more than the former again?
OS/2 their marketing was horrible, they had an opportunity with Windows 3.1 lagging for too long, but they made a stupid commercial that the public didn't even know what it was about. And they let Microsoft make Windows 95 seem like what Windows 7 is. (and cost hundreds of dollars less)
I agree that OS/2 represented one of the greatest marketing screw-ups in the history of marketing. They should have eaten Microsoft's lunch with OS/2 but instead found themselves on the outside looking in. IIRC they tried the brilliant slogan of "I just totally warped my computer!" which a lot of people had a hard time comprehending to be a good thing.
It was, nonetheless, an excellent product for its time. IIRC it was still running on ATMs and other embedded platforms not too long ago.
The PowerPC line, They were doing good until the Gigahertz range was common in Intel, Power PC was still in MHZ. Intel started to make much faster chips and PowerPC couldn't get caught up.
I think they could have saved this without breaking their necks for GHz. That said, they did pull off quite a feat when they had all three of the current-generation home gaming consoles running on PowerPC or PowerPC-derived CPUs. The CPUs were able to to great things at lower clock speeds, but once again IBM was failed - at least in part - by wholly inept marketing.
Lexmark Printers, I hated repairing those guys used by Banks and other IBM shops, they in general were hard to maintain.
Maintenance wasn't great, but they brought some important technologies to the consumer.
DeskStar hard drives. They weret nicknamed DeathStar hard drives for a reason.
I would say this was yet another case of IBM collapsing under failures of bad marketing. They had one generation of drives that went down badly, and ended up giving up the whole shooting match as a result. DeskStars on either side of the "DeathStar" generation were excellent, I owned many over the years. There is a reason why Hitachi kept the DeskStar name going after buying it from IBM, it represented quality hard drives (excluding one awful generation).
x86 Servers. Why go with IBM when everyone else had one as well.
From my experience it was worth it to get an IBM server due to ease of maintenance and better service contract terms.
The ThinkPad was good.
A lot of people will tell you it still is, even under Lenovo. I'm using a Lenovo ThinkPad right now and it's doing as well as the IBM ThinkPad it replaced. I haven't tried out the Lenovo warranty yet, though.