Recently I purchased a T61P. When I opened the box and felt it, I thought "This doesn't feel nearly as robust as my old T43." The keyboard felt flimsy. The mouse buttons felt as if they'd break after a few months. The entire chassis felt appropriate for a bargain sub $500 laptop, but not a $1500 Thinkpad. When I booted up Knoppix (I didn't want to accept any windows licenses) the screen looked sub-standard.
So I returned it and bought an Acer laptop for $400 on sale. Lenovo's staff required a bit of convincing to get out of the 15% restocking fee, but they eventually caved. Unfortunately, I had to pay to ship it back to Lenovo's warehouse in the Carolinas. After they received my laptop, it took them two weeks to credit my card.
My $400 Acer has dreadful Linux support (Atheros wireless that doesn't even work with ndiswrapper), the battery life is awful, but the screen looks better. I can forgive a lot for $400...but not $1500.
Lenovo needs to improve their quality, or provide deep discounts. They're doomed if they continue in the direction they're going.
If you're just looking for a business-grade Wiki, TWiki ( http://www.twiki.org/ ) is another possibility. It doesn't have the source code repository features of Trac, but it has all sorts of business-oriented modules to do all hosts of business things.
He might have received a shorter sentence, and we wouldn't want that for such a naughty person!
I'm not claiming he didn't break the law, nor am I suggesting that he shouldn't "do the time". I'm just pointing out inconsistencies in sentencing, and how criminal geeks often get longer terms than murderers. *sigh*
This idea certainly authenticates that someone holds a given private key at the beginning of a virtual meeting. It doesn't take the notion of session hijacking into account, or other potential attacks, however. A more complete solution is the prior, and after the meeting is adjourned have every member take the entire logged conversation (fetched from ftp, perhaps) and sign that as well. This way you're establishing that someone is who they say they are at the beginning, and that they're still them at the end. Should people question the contents of this remote log, they can diff it against their own personal log they should have been saving. However, using a log on a public server makes it easier for everyone to compare the conversation, as there won't be any formatting differences in the log format that everyone's signing.
I'm noticing lots of posts on this article confusing authentication with authorization and encryption. It doesn't sound like the members care if others see their conversation (encryption's purpose.) Additionally, it doesn't sound like they need an automated means of authorization. There are humans in the chat room for that. It sounds like their primary concern is that the people chatting actually are who they say they are (Authentication).
I wouldn't even consider buying it. Resist fellow geeks! They're a maniacal evil company that picks on open source projects that in no way interfere with their cash flow! Let 'em die!
Well...Watchman Nee and Witness Lee's interpretation there is a bit "out there". Suggesting that the Antichrist's spirit was in Nero?
Furthermore, verse 15 doesn't say that everyone will be killed immediatly. IANAAGS (I Am Not An Ancient Greek Scholar:-), but based on the handful of other translations I briefly scanned, doesn't it also seem possible to be killed by, say starvation? If you need the mark of the beast (or an RFID tag on your arm or forehead) in order to purchase food, in an urban society you will eventually die.
The simple fact of the matter is, the overwhelming majority of biblical scholars (and Christians who are into that sort of thing) consider the book of Revelation to not be literal. Think about it. If you believe that the Bible is God's inspired word, and that God inspired someone living in Roman times (John) to write a "Revelation" of times far into the future through visions, then how could he describe the things he saw to people in Roman times but through allegory.
And if you're reading this and consider it off topic, consider the following. There is such a thing as a Christian Nerd (although I pale in comparison to several of my friends).
Futhermore, technology that sounds like the mark of the beast is certainly nerdy!
Excuse the sentence fragment from the parent. I'm currently suffering from caffine deprivation.;-)
Mark of the beast?
on
RFID Explained
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Yes...this always comes up anytime some story regarding chips underneath skin. But it doesn't sound too difficult to slip a RFID tag underneath a hand or forehead.
You're making the same mistake many businessmen have made over the years. You're confusing Texan with stupid.
Would you have asked for an IQ test of Clinton when he was in a state of arousal? He was there quite freqently, even when talking to foreign dignataries on the phone.
Last I checked, Bush isn't calling for air strikes on Asprin factories when it's politically convienent either.
People like you will wake up some day and realize Bush isn't the moron you think he is. You'll also realize exceptionally high intelligence doesn't necessarly make for good Presidents. Take President Carter, for instance.
Good character, good judge of other's character, the the ability to smell BS from your underlings are much more important traits for a President then genius IQ. Until you understand this, do the country a favor and please don't vote.
I'm really suprised no one mentioned these yet. They're the funny connectors you plug into your internal hard drives. They provide 5V and 12V DC. This should be more than sufficient for the overwhelming majority of trinkets people need power for on their desk.
All that's needed is a sheath around the four wires, and some cute molding between this sheath and the Molex connector.
Why in the world has no one thought of this before?
If molex connectors aren't your thing, then do something with the mini connectors you use in your floppy drive (although if you're sufficiently clueless it is possible to plug these in reverse polarity.).
Reminds me of an incident at the.com I was at a few years ago.
Marketing Droid: Did you fix the DNS? It's wrong. Me: I didn't know it wasn't working, hold on a second and let me check. Marketing Droid: [Harvard MBA CEO] is really upset about it. We need to take care of it. Me: Hold on...I'm checking as fast as I can. [Droid hands me a piece of paper] Marketing Droid: Here's the preliminary sketch for what we want to do. [I look at the paper, and realize it has nothing to do with the Domain Name System, but rather something about Solociting] Me: What exactly does DNS stand for? Droid: Well duh! Do Not Solicit, of course!
WHACK!!! Thousands of Droid parts are scattered by the force of my LART.
At my last job, about a year ago, the head boss hired a webmonkey without consulting me at all. To describe this guy as an arrogont moron is being kind. He had some sort of graphic art skills, knew nothing about the web other than the basics of Dweebweaver, and had the audacity to call himself a "web developer".
Ever met a web designer who: Didn't know what CGI was Wasn't familiar with the redirect tag Didn't know what a hidden form element was Asked "What's a 'robots' file?"
On top of that, he wasn't responding to LARTs. I tried really hard to be nice to this guy, but on top of all this, he was a nasty back-stabbing jerk.
Oh, and let's not forget how the site was redesigned. He brought in a consultant to "help". The consultant was at least a nice guy and had a clue, but still didn't produce code that passes the W3C validator.
Management finally fired this moron after several weeks of hell for this poor sysadmin.
Part of the reason I left.
P.S. If your company ever considers out-sourcing it's web development, demand that the contract state something like, "All static web pages, and dynamically generated pages must produce no more than zero errors, when run through the appropriate W3C Validator located at http://www.w3c.com. At any time, should any errors be found with this tool, the web-development firm agrees to fix them within a reasonable amount of time, free of charge." That's the general idea, but IANAL, so run it past the appropriate counsel for wording.
Sounds good to me. Unfortunately some boneheads out there only supply content with WMA-only formats. That's why I only use it with "crossover". They can EULA me up to wazoo, but they're not getting any control over my PC.
I was very dissapointed at the end of Air Force One. While Harrison Ford is an excellent, entertaining actor, his flicks tend to have crappy physics and redicilious interactions with computers.
The last few minutes of Air Force One seem a bit far fetched. The bit about slideing across a rope to another airplane, while I guess possible seems sort of unlikely. The real hideousness was when Air Force One actually hit the water. You'd expect it to crumble into bits. Nope. It performed ballet over the water. It danced. You'd expect when the nose touched the water the tail would flip forward very rapidly. Instead the plane bounced on the water, sort of like your toy plane bounced on the couch when you were playing "engine trouble" at age 6.
What a hideous ending to an otherwise entertaining flick.
Sailing is plenty geeky. I mean really now, you're powering a craft by wind. There are tons of details you constantly have to consider. Geeks love details, and they love to think.
Should you need exercise, sail on a Hobiecat. On a windy day, it feels like you're going fast, and trust me, when you're leaning out over the water hanging from your trapiese you're getting tons of exercise.
While Hobie's are cool, they're not designed for beginners. A sunfish is great fun learning. Should you want exercise, flip it intentionally. Sunfishes are near trivial to right, and pretty fun boats to sail. (For those who don't know, a sunfish is a tiny sailboat which can reasonably accomodate one or two people for an afternoon.)
"Don't try selling paperback fiction for $25. I don't care how good the book is, that's excessive."
Let me take this a step further. The only author's who have something to fear are those who write trash that people don't want to hold on to. Most people don't sell their Grisham novels the day after they read them. They consider them too good to just chuck.
Do you notice a similarity here between these whining authors and the music industry? The label execs whine about the fact that their latest one hit wonder's only song is flying around gnutella. That's because people are willing to buy CD's for the cover art and lyrics, but they're not going to shell out $17 just for one song. They don't want to spend $25 on a sub-standard paperback either.
The moral? Focus on quality and you don't have to worry about changes in the marketplace as much.
It would help tremendously if the Changelogs were more detailed. Too many of the entries in them say things like "Fixed bug in Widget driver" which on many occasions has left me wondering, "What bug?".
When I've been experiencing flaky behaviour from my widget driver, it would be very nice to know if a given fix will fix it.
I'm new to the Tampa area and just visited Ybor city for the first time yesterday. I noticed the cameras around, but I noticed almost no Police presence. Odd. That said, Ybor City is sort of a dump. Do yourself a favor and stay away.
Uh...*nux boxen are immune to code red, and the overwhelming majority of virii. The platform is very unfriendly to virii. McAfee and other virus protection products are completely unnecessary for Unicies.
Unix based programs do not simply look at the extension to determine what to do with the file. Instead, they tend to use tools like the magic database (run "man 5 magic" to learn more) to determine what type of data a given file contains. AFAIK, no major *nix tools are programmed in such a lame fashion as to simply look at file extensions.
Re:I think you're being more than fair
on
Calculating God
·
· Score: 3
>A tenet of Christainity is that "proof denies faith" and Pope JPII recently called apon young people to follow the Path of Faith, rather than the path of Reason, because it was deceptive.
I find it disturbing that many christians unfortunately do believe this. I'm a Christian, and I most certainly do not. A few weeks ago while googling around, I found this orginization and was plesently suprised to see that I'm not alone. From their mission statement (please forgive me for quoting a stinkin' mission statement:-):
The mission of Reasons To Believe is to show that science and faith are, and always will be, allies, not enemies.
Interstingly enough, their founder became a Christian from studying science.
It isn't necessary to "...surrender [your] personality to the political and social programs fostered by churches..." in order to be a Christian. To the contrary, my faith is frequently stregenthened by science, and in some cases "pseudo-science" that jumps through hoops in order to get around the idea of an intelligent creator. Faith does indeed require belief in things that can't be proven, but then again, the same is required to believe that the universe "just happened" (which is why many quantum physicsts at least believe in some sort of pantheistic notion of god.)
Under unstable, there is a rather alarming frequency with which things break (does anyone out there have a successfully installed emacs19 or emacs20 from the past four months?), though usually this just means that the upgrade doesn't install.
Really? I've been running Debian unstable for the past 6 months or so (with a 28.8:-), and have had hardly any problems. Most problems are subtle, and are fixed within a few hours quite often, or a few days at the most. The only real problem I had was that my X-server configuration got screwed up, but I believe that was due to me answering the question about replacing the configuration file, during install time, incorrectly.
*flamegard on* Besides, real men use vim.:-) */flamegard off*
The really amazing thing about Debian though is that I can upgrade like mad, and still leave my system running. I upgrade almost daily, and right now have an uptime of 41 days, and it's that short due only to extended (a few hours) power outages. A friend of mine who runs a small ISP upgrades his debian-unstable box while 100 users are logged in. Mind you, he's conservative about what he allows deselect to upgrade, but I think that's pretty amazing.
Slashdot Mirror
I think this poster may be alluding to this brilliant utterance.
Given Sony's forays into drm, I think eliminating yet another means of copying is the real reason.
I second these sentiments.
Recently I purchased a T61P. When I opened the box and felt it, I thought "This doesn't feel nearly as robust as my old T43." The keyboard felt flimsy. The mouse buttons felt as if they'd break after a few months. The entire chassis felt appropriate for a bargain sub $500 laptop, but not a $1500 Thinkpad. When I booted up Knoppix (I didn't want to accept any windows licenses) the screen looked sub-standard.
So I returned it and bought an Acer laptop for $400 on sale. Lenovo's staff required a bit of convincing to get out of the 15% restocking fee, but they eventually caved. Unfortunately, I had to pay to ship it back to Lenovo's warehouse in the Carolinas. After they received my laptop, it took them two weeks to credit my card.
My $400 Acer has dreadful Linux support (Atheros wireless that doesn't even work with ndiswrapper), the battery life is awful, but the screen looks better. I can forgive a lot for $400...but not $1500.
Lenovo needs to improve their quality, or provide deep discounts. They're doomed if they continue in the direction they're going.
If you're just looking for a business-grade Wiki, TWiki ( http://www.twiki.org/ ) is another possibility. It doesn't have the source code repository features of Trac, but it has all sorts of business-oriented modules to do all hosts of business things.
Sys Admin Mag ran an article about tweaking its read only performance a few months ago: http://www.samag.com/articles/2006/0604/
Oh...and you'd better have lots of Linux experience, and love dealing with Exchange and IIS.
He might have received a shorter sentence, and we wouldn't want that for such a naughty person!
I'm not claiming he didn't break the law, nor am I suggesting that he shouldn't "do the time". I'm just pointing out inconsistencies in sentencing, and how criminal geeks often get longer terms than murderers. *sigh*
This idea certainly authenticates that someone holds a given private key at the beginning of a virtual meeting. It doesn't take the notion of session hijacking into account, or other potential attacks, however. A more complete solution is the prior, and after the meeting is adjourned have every member take the entire logged conversation (fetched from ftp, perhaps) and sign that as well. This way you're establishing that someone is who they say they are at the beginning, and that they're still them at the end. Should people question the contents of this remote log, they can diff it against their own personal log they should have been saving. However, using a log on a public server makes it easier for everyone to compare the conversation, as there won't be any formatting differences in the log format that everyone's signing.
I'm noticing lots of posts on this article confusing authentication with authorization and encryption. It doesn't sound like the members care if others see their conversation (encryption's purpose.) Additionally, it doesn't sound like they need an automated means of authorization. There are humans in the chat room for that. It sounds like their primary concern is that the people chatting actually are who they say they are (Authentication).
I wouldn't even consider buying it. Resist fellow geeks! They're a maniacal evil company that picks on open source projects that in no way interfere with their cash flow! Let 'em die!
Well...Watchman Nee and Witness Lee's interpretation there is a bit "out there". Suggesting that the Antichrist's spirit was in Nero?
:-), but based on the handful of other translations I briefly scanned, doesn't it also seem possible to be killed by, say starvation? If you need the mark of the beast (or an RFID tag on your arm or forehead) in order to purchase food, in an urban society you will eventually die.
Furthermore, verse 15 doesn't say that everyone will be killed immediatly. IANAAGS (I Am Not An Ancient Greek Scholar
The simple fact of the matter is, the overwhelming majority of biblical scholars (and Christians who are into that sort of thing) consider the book of Revelation to not be literal. Think about it. If you believe that the Bible is God's inspired word, and that God inspired someone living in Roman times (John) to write a "Revelation" of times far into the future through visions, then how could he describe the things he saw to people in Roman times but through allegory.
And if you're reading this and consider it off topic, consider the following. There is such a thing as a Christian Nerd (although I pale in comparison to several of my friends).
Futhermore, technology that sounds like the mark of the beast is certainly nerdy!
Excuse the sentence fragment from the parent. I'm currently suffering from caffine deprivation. ;-)
Yes...this always comes up anytime some story regarding chips underneath skin. But it doesn't sound too difficult to slip a RFID tag underneath a hand or forehead.
Sounds an awful lot like this.
You're making the same mistake many businessmen have made over the years. You're confusing Texan with stupid.
Would you have asked for an IQ test of Clinton when he was in a state of arousal? He was there quite freqently, even when talking to foreign dignataries on the phone.
Last I checked, Bush isn't calling for air strikes on Asprin factories when it's politically convienent either.
People like you will wake up some day and realize Bush isn't the moron you think he is. You'll also realize exceptionally high intelligence doesn't necessarly make for good Presidents. Take President Carter, for instance.
Good character, good judge of other's character, the the ability to smell BS from your underlings are much more important traits for a President then genius IQ. Until you understand this, do the country a favor and please don't vote.
I'm really suprised no one mentioned these yet. They're the funny connectors you plug into your internal hard drives. They provide 5V and 12V DC. This should be more than sufficient for the overwhelming majority of trinkets people need power for on their desk.
All that's needed is a sheath around the four wires, and some cute molding between this sheath and the Molex connector.
Why in the world has no one thought of this before?
If molex connectors aren't your thing, then do something with the mini connectors you use in your floppy drive (although if you're sufficiently clueless it is possible to plug these in reverse polarity.).
Reminds me of an incident at the .com I was at a few years ago.
Marketing Droid: Did you fix the DNS? It's wrong.
Me: I didn't know it wasn't working, hold on a second and let me check.
Marketing Droid: [Harvard MBA CEO] is really upset about it. We need to take care of it.
Me: Hold on...I'm checking as fast as I can.
[Droid hands me a piece of paper]
Marketing Droid: Here's the preliminary sketch for what we want to do.
[I look at the paper, and realize it has nothing to do with the Domain Name System, but rather something about Solociting]
Me: What exactly does DNS stand for?
Droid: Well duh! Do Not Solicit, of course!
WHACK!!!
Thousands of Droid parts are scattered by the force of my LART.
Oh tell me about it.
At my last job, about a year ago, the head boss hired a webmonkey without consulting me at all. To describe this guy as an arrogont moron is being kind. He had some sort of graphic art skills, knew nothing about the web other than the basics of Dweebweaver, and had the audacity to call himself a "web developer".
Ever met a web designer who:
Didn't know what CGI was
Wasn't familiar with the redirect tag
Didn't know what a hidden form element was
Asked "What's a 'robots' file?"
On top of that, he wasn't responding to LARTs. I tried really hard to be nice to this guy, but on top of all this, he was a nasty back-stabbing jerk.
Oh, and let's not forget how the site was redesigned. He brought in a consultant to "help". The consultant was at least a nice guy and had a clue, but still didn't produce code that passes the W3C validator.
Management finally fired this moron after several weeks of hell for this poor sysadmin.
Part of the reason I left.
P.S. If your company ever considers out-sourcing it's web development, demand that the contract state something like, "All static web pages, and dynamically generated pages must produce no more than zero errors, when run through the appropriate W3C Validator located at http://www.w3c.com. At any time, should any errors be found with this tool, the web-development firm agrees to fix them within a reasonable amount of time, free of charge." That's the general idea, but IANAL, so run it past the appropriate counsel for wording.
Sounds good to me. Unfortunately some boneheads out there only supply content with WMA-only formats. That's why I only use it with "crossover". They can EULA me up to wazoo, but they're not getting any control over my PC.
I was very dissapointed at the end of Air Force One. While Harrison Ford is an excellent, entertaining actor, his flicks tend to have crappy physics and redicilious interactions with computers.
The last few minutes of Air Force One seem a bit far fetched. The bit about slideing across a rope to another airplane, while I guess possible seems sort of unlikely. The real hideousness was when Air Force One actually hit the water. You'd expect it to crumble into bits. Nope. It performed ballet over the water. It danced. You'd expect when the nose touched the water the tail would flip forward very rapidly. Instead the plane bounced on the water, sort of like your toy plane bounced on the couch when you were playing "engine trouble" at age 6.
What a hideous ending to an otherwise entertaining flick.
Sailing is plenty geeky. I mean really now, you're powering a craft by wind. There are tons of details you constantly have to consider. Geeks love details, and they love to think.
Should you need exercise, sail on a Hobiecat. On a windy day, it feels like you're going fast, and trust me, when you're leaning out over the water hanging from your trapiese you're getting tons of exercise.
While Hobie's are cool, they're not designed for beginners. A sunfish is great fun learning. Should you want exercise, flip it intentionally. Sunfishes are near trivial to right, and pretty fun boats to sail. (For those who don't know, a sunfish is a tiny sailboat which can reasonably accomodate one or two people for an afternoon.)
"Don't try selling paperback fiction for $25. I don't care how good the book is, that's excessive."
Let me take this a step further. The only author's who have something to fear are those who write trash that people don't want to hold on to. Most people don't sell their Grisham novels the day after they read them. They consider them too good to just chuck.
Do you notice a similarity here between these whining authors and the music industry? The label execs whine about the fact that their latest one hit wonder's only song is flying around gnutella. That's because people are willing to buy CD's for the cover art and lyrics, but they're not going to shell out $17 just for one song. They don't want to spend $25 on a sub-standard paperback either.
The moral? Focus on quality and you don't have to worry about changes in the marketplace as much.
It would help tremendously if the Changelogs were more detailed. Too many of the entries in them say things like "Fixed bug in Widget driver" which on many occasions has left me wondering, "What bug?".
When I've been experiencing flaky behaviour from my widget driver, it would be very nice to know if a given fix will fix it.
I'm new to the Tampa area and just visited Ybor city for the first time yesterday. I noticed the cameras around, but I noticed almost no Police presence. Odd. That said, Ybor City is sort of a dump. Do yourself a favor and stay away.
Uh...*nux boxen are immune to code red, and the overwhelming majority of virii. The platform is very unfriendly to virii. McAfee and other virus protection products are completely unnecessary for Unicies.
Unix based programs do not simply look at the extension to determine what to do with the file. Instead, they tend to use tools like the magic database (run "man 5 magic" to learn more) to determine what type of data a given file contains. AFAIK, no major *nix tools are programmed in such a lame fashion as to simply look at file extensions.
>A tenet of Christainity is that "proof denies faith" and Pope JPII recently called apon young people to follow the Path of Faith, rather than the path of Reason, because it was deceptive.
I find it disturbing that many christians unfortunately do believe this. I'm a Christian, and I most certainly do not. A few weeks ago while googling around, I found this orginization and was plesently suprised to see that I'm not alone. From their mission statement (please forgive me for quoting a stinkin' mission statement :-) :
The mission of Reasons To Believe is to show that science and faith are, and always will be, allies, not enemies.
Interstingly enough, their founder became a Christian from studying science.
Be sure to check out this group's interesting article on string theory and Christianity.
It isn't necessary to "...surrender [your] personality to the political and social programs fostered by churches..." in order to be a Christian. To the contrary, my faith is frequently stregenthened by science, and in some cases "pseudo-science" that jumps through hoops in order to get around the idea of an intelligent creator. Faith does indeed require belief in things that can't be proven, but then again, the same is required to believe that the universe "just happened" (which is why many quantum physicsts at least believe in some sort of pantheistic notion of god.)
Under unstable, there is a rather alarming frequency with which things break (does anyone out there have a successfully installed emacs19 or emacs20 from the past four months?), though usually this just means that the upgrade doesn't install.
:-), and have had hardly any problems. Most problems are subtle, and are fixed within a few hours quite often, or a few days at the most. The only real problem I had was that my X-server configuration got screwed up, but I believe that was due to me answering the question about replacing the configuration file, during install time, incorrectly.
:-) */flamegard off*
Really? I've been running Debian unstable for the past 6 months or so (with a 28.8
*flamegard on* Besides, real men use vim.
The really amazing thing about Debian though is that I can upgrade like mad, and still leave my system running. I upgrade almost daily, and right now have an uptime of 41 days, and it's that short due only to extended (a few hours) power outages. A friend of mine who runs a small ISP upgrades his debian-unstable box while 100 users are logged in. Mind you, he's conservative about what he allows deselect to upgrade, but I think that's pretty amazing.