My point is the "were supposed to" is very vague. You could say they "were supposed to" back things up because they had a policy of backing up customer data on web and FTP sites as a courtesy. You could also say they "were supposed to" back things up if they were under contractual obligation to this specific client to have a certain percentage of data recovered, up to and including 100%.
The article doesn't specify, the summary doesn't specify, and unless I see an actual contract I sure as hell can't specify.
I believe you should be able to pay for that, too. But suing someone because they say "we backup our servers" and you think that means they guarantee 100% data retention is just the worst kind of careless oversight. If you find the ISP's website as I did and read the description of services and the ToS, there's no way an informed consumer would believe they are getting 100% guaranteed data backup. The company disclaims even being fit for use for any particular purpose.
The article its not very clear on that at all. It says they were supposed to back up the server. It doesn't say they were statutorily required to do so. It does not say they were contractually required to do so. It does not say they were required to successfully store the backup copies. It does not say they were required to perform a flawless recovery. It doesn't say what penalties for nonperformance or guarantee of service there would be.
I just read the ToS on the company's web site. It is suspicious that it says it's current as of April 1st... like maybe they changed it after the fact. But it does specifically say this ( lc()'ed to get past/. yelling filter, as this was all caps):
you expressly agree that use of the cyberlynk network site is at your sole risk. you expressly agree that neither cyberlynk network, nor its affiliated or related entities, nor any of their respective employees, or agents, nor any person or entity involved in the creation, production, and distribution of cyberlynk network's web site are responsible or liable to any person or entity whatsoever for any loss, damage (whether actual, consequential, punitive or otherwise), injury, claim, liability or other cause of any kind or character whatsoever based upon or resulting from the use or misuse of this site or any other cyberlynk network web site. by way of example, and without limiting the generality of the foregoing, cyberlynk network and related persons and entities shall not be responsible or liable for any claim or damage arising from failure of performance, error, omission, interruption, deletion, defect, delay in operation, computer virus, theft, destruction, unauthorized access to or alteration of personal records, or the reliance upon or use of data, information, opinions or other materials appearing on this site. you (and not cyberlynk network) assume the entire cost of, and responsibility for any and all necessary servicing, repair or correction resulting from your use of this site. in addition, you expressly acknowledge and agree that cyberlynk network is not liable or responsible for any defamatory, offensive or illegal conduct of other subscribers or third parties.
So even if they were responsible yesterday, they won't be in the future. It's a good faith effort, and you're still in charge of your own data in the end.
It's the mirroring part that provides the safety net. In fact, if you're using an ISP that doesn't state explicitly in their ToS that backups are your responsibility and that any backups they provide are a best-effort courtesy service then find yourself an ISP that'll still be in business in six months to move to. Yes, I've worked in the ISP and hosting biz. I have for over a decade, and I now work for one of the big boys.
There are plenty of things around your house that could run on hydrogen. It's a decent heating and cooking fuel. It's safer to have a 50-gallon tank of hydrogen in your house you can recharge nightly rather than a 1500 gallon tank of liquified petroleum gas sitting just outside it, filled twice a year by truck.
Fuck congested areas. It's easy to solve the mass transit problem for high-density areas. How are you going to run a train or bus around a town of 30,000 or smaller and make that economically feasible? People don't only travel to big cities.
Getting that sort of service into every home is going to do wonders for utility capacity planners. They'll be heavily recruited millionaires in no time.
One option is to use household current (including alt sources like wind and solar) to do electrolysis on water and have a hydrogen fuel-cell car. That way you get to have electric drive and fast fill without dumping high voltages across a charger. There's a little more household infrastructure for the storage tanks and such, and hydrogen fuel cell cars are rarer than plug-ins even though both are around.
You don't even need anything particularly special to produce diesel fuel. A few filters and readily available chemicals to treat some vegetable, grain, or nut oils is all it takes. Just don't drink the lye.;-)
If you're using more than 35 or 40 horsepower to maintain cruising speed, you're doing something wrong or your minivan is especially broken. You use your torque mostly in low-end acceleration and your horsepower mostly in high-end acceleration. Many smaller cars require half of that to maintain speed once it's achieved, even with heavy steel frames and inefficiencies in planetary gearboxes, transaxles, and rear ends differentials. Your horsepower, unless otherwise stated, is at the engine crank for one thing. Electrics can drive the wheels directly without a clutch, gearbox, transaxle, and another set of gears.
Another option is a charging rail or inductive loop in the roads, but that doesn't seem at all practical. The car ferry replaces the need to rent an unfamiliar car at the far end, move all your bags from car to train to car, pay for parking your car at the train station, and plan ahead for the rental. It's a great option I've also been pushing for years, including to that silly White House "give us your ideas" website Obama had published when he first took office.
The big idea behind RISC was to design simpler processors in the first place so you could ramp up the clock rates. This is taking an existing chip and getting rid of portions of it. They're in the same ballpark, but not quite the same thing. Modern x86 chips were designed to be RISC with a CISC-to-RISC instruction decoder place in front, so it's kind of like that.
So you take offense to someone making a public document more public? That's what the kid did. He took a public document and made it more public. Kind of like Slashdot does, or your local newspaper. Fuck anyone who calls that illegal. Did he do it with the intention of harassing her? Is there a pattern of harassment? Those are questions for the court, maybe, but not for Slashdot to answer.
Not at all. I have ADHD and that page is annoying like people bitching about mosquitoes around their kids' stagnant wading pool. Life's full of hard problems. People need to fix the easy ones rather than bitch about them. Easy problems involve having a shit web page that annoys the hell out of people, and inviting the general public to a party. Fix the page and, revoke the public invitation or charge a nice hefty cover.
Unfortunately one of the hard problems in life is that there are people who think pages like that don't need fixing. Now that's a difficult one to change, short of licensing the use of web hosting or mass forced sterilization or something. Those just bring more problems with them, though. Someone stupid enough to invite world plus dog to a party probably think that page is slick and stylish, so it's going to remain annoying.
No, at a "fucking party" it's the guests who are fucking. That's why when you're using "fucking" as a superlative for "best", it gets attached to "best" and not "party", where it'd be an adjective instead. I fucking know these fucking words fucking used as fucking multiple different fucking parts of speech can be fucking confusing, so I'm fucking happy to fucking help you out in this fucking matter.
"or offend"... wow. Freedom of fucking speech got raped right there in every orifice. Australia, land of the whipped and home of the chained decides you're not allowed to offend? Fuck those pussies. I have the right to offend anyone I scatting well please, praise be to the NRA and the ACLU.
There, do you think they'll try to extradite me? I think that little tirade is offensive myself, but it had to be done for demonstrative purposes. If I didn't do it, it might not have been done.
There were 6, 10, and even 20 Mbps radios ten years ago, but no home suer was paying for them. If you had a grain elevator or rock quarry out in the rolling country hills an needed a whole office online, it may be worth the cost. I he's getting those speeds to residential users now for anything less than hundreds of dollars a month, then more power to him and I'm thrilled for his customers. We actually cut costs quite a bit by using point-to-point 10 Mbps radios as short backhauls for the customers so we could run several towers from one PoP cabinet with all the lines coming into one demarc. With half a meg or so apiece, we could put 20 on a backhaul radio before even thinking of overselling. A few customers clsoe enough to the towers actually got as high as 800 Mbps, which at the time was a real bargain for that price.
What I'd really love to see in areas like that (like where my parents live, 7 miles from a town that's only 18,000 people to begin with) is people putting ready-to-plug BATMAN boxes on rooftop antenna masts and routing around the countryside from city to city in coops and buying bandwidth as a combined pool at multiple urban points around the edges of their rural service areas. The tech is almost ready. Now we just need to form the movement. It may even push into the cities someday if enough people get behind it.
I'm glad to see this guy doing this, but it's not exactly unprecedented. It was done on grain silos, grain elevators, water towers, leased space on other people's towers, and even on flagpoles all over rural Illinois and Missouri a decade ago. I worked for some ISPs that did this and did some of the server consulting work for more than one startup doing this, too. I wasn't the one climbing to do the radio work.
The startup cost for the customer is still pretty high for this sort of thing, usually around $200 to $275. Then it's typically $50 to $70 per month for around 400k to 600k down and 128k up or 256k or 512k symmetric, depending on which company and how far you are from their towers.
Frontier is putting 6Mbps DSL in lots of former Verizon territory in towns as small as 3,000 or 4,000 people. Only the really rural places will need this sort of thing in Frontier's areas soon, and it's much more expensive even with radio equipment to get the people on 80 and 120 acre or even larger plots miles from towns covered. That is, much more expensive compared to using the same radio towers closer in. It's still much cheaper than running new cables to all those customers.
It's not a perfect solution, but when weighed against dialup in the countryside or having to move closer in and change your lifestyle just for decent Internet access, a lot of people who don't prize low latencies and high throughputs as much as your typical Slashdotter will be happy to have it.
Damn smugglers. When cargo boats wouldn't do it, they got jet boats. Then they started using planes. Then submarines. How the hell is the Coast Guard supposed to interdict the shuttles or especially the Russian Soyuz capsules?;-)
The q(') key moves the piece to the right. The enter key drops the piece. The space bar will also drop the piece if there's nowhere to scroll down on the page behind it. The arrow keys do nothing unless there's somewhere to scroll the page left or right, in which case they do.
It's currently unplayable on Chromium due to these issues, but it's still a pretty impressive demo.
Chromium version is 11.0.696.3 (dev) Mandriva 2010.2 for the record. I get the same results from Google Chrome 7.0.517.41 on the same system.
It works well in Opera.
Version information Version: 11.01 Build: 1190 Platform: Linux System: x86_64, 2.6.36.2-desktop-2mnb Browser identification: Opera/9.80 (X11; Linux x86_64; U; en) Presto/2.7.62 Version/11.01
Some of the lesser-known browsers:
Konqueror says it doesn't support the URL scheme javascript: and is explicitly clear about that.
Arora 0.5.2 (WebKit version: 532.4) plays as Chrome/Chromium do. It's one of those many lightweight WebKit browsers.
Midori 0.2.6 (GTK+ 2.20.1, WebKitGTK+ 1.2.0) is a lightweight web browser that also plays as Chromium/Chrome do. I see a pattern.
Epiphany (Web Browser 2.30.5) is another WebKit browser. This one fairs worse than the other WebKit browsers because any single-quote key hit works once for the JavaScript and the next is captured by the browser to open its search feature or type into it. This requires putting focus back on Tetris with the mouse.
Hv3 oddly enough supports JavaScript but refuses to recognize a javascript: scheme. It doesn't clearly state its distaste for it like Konqueror. It just puts 'http://' in front of it automatically.
Fennec 1.0.0 (The mobile thing from Mozilla) did run the Tetris interface but not take any input from the keyboard at all. That's probably a bug in the early version of their mobile browser ported to the desktop. The mouse clicks for reset and quit worked fine.
NetSurf (ported to Linux from RiscOS, this particular one being on a Pentium M laptop with Mandriva 2010.0 as I haven't put it on the desktop yet) doesn't like the URL in the location bar. It also wouldn't load the script properly from a link. The browser has some JavaScript support, but it just doesn't go this far. It officially has only partial support, and this outstrips that. It's no big deal for those of us who use it once in a while alongside bigger, slower browsers that handle much more JavaScript.
So, I think there you have it. You support Firefox and Opera well right now. If you can figure out WebKit compatibility you should be able to waste everyone's time, as everyone should have at least one of Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Chromium, or Safari. If not, WebKit should also get those freaks with none of the mainstream browsers who happen to have Arora, Midori, or some other minor WebKit browser.
My Galeon installation is currently broken and not worth fixing with all these other browsers around, but I'm guessing it should work the same as a really old Firefox since it uses Gecko. I was unable to find a version of it newer than 2006 anyway, and that's ancient when talking about JavaScript in a browser. I read that the project was completely discontinued in 2008.
So, there's a testing report and a brief survey of the randomness installed on my systems for cross-browser testing purposes. HTH. HAND.
WarGames is much like The Matrix... or Fletch... or Caddy Shack... or The Karate Kid...
One of the best things to say is, "That was such an awesome movie. It's too bad they never made a sequel".
The fact that there was, indeed, a movie made to cash in on the original's success which is not worthy to be its sequel does not make the statement incorrect. It is, in fact, the very point. Making a movie with the same name and even some of the same characters that purports to take place some time farther along the timeline is not all it takes to classify as a sequel. The movie should also be in the same class of art.
BTW, remakes != sequels. The new Karate Kid (which may as well be called The Kung Fu Kid if it wasn't for the original) isn't ruled out by this.
I'd say the WOPR came close for unoffensive appearance of both the machine and the displays.
Heck, the systems in Star Wars (the original, now called "Star Wars: Episode IV, A New Hope") aren't that bad, either, considering all the tech around them. Star Wars wasn't even remotely about the computers, but they managed to get several things right. Why someone would put the power relay for a tractor beam on a narrow catwalk with no rail could only be explained by spartan budget constraints, but then again they were on an expensive battle station built to be capable of destroying worlds. They were probably already over budget. Don't try to sell me the old line about an astromech droid not being able to turn the power off to the garbage processing facilities. Who the hell keeps a maintenance man from turning off the waste disposals in the middle of your base for security purposes? Maybe the astromechs should have had voice synthesizers for when they weren't actually repairing a ship, but usually they are plugged into a socket. Besides, the interplay between C3PO and R2D2 is worth it. Why Star Wars isn't mentioned more often in threads like this, I'll never know. Droids for interpreters and maintenance tasks seem only natural progressions of computers and robotics.
There were, however, lots of Pentium MMX laptops. They also made Pentium II-based Celeron laptops and Pentium III and Pentium III-based Celeron laptops. Some people applied the "P6" moniker not only to the Pentium Pro, but also to the Pentium MMX, Pentium II (which was basically a Pentium Pro + MMX), and even up through the Pentium M and Pentium IV. The new families of chips since would be the Core, Core 2, and Core i series.
Also, despite some poser on IMDB saying that the PCI bus underlaid all Pentium systems and that therefore the statement about the PCI bus affecting the screen refresh is wrong, not all Pentium systems in fact used the PCI bus. Some used VESA Local Bus, which was admittedly outdated. Some used EISA. IBM had MicroChannel (MCA). In fact, many laptops of the time didn't use the PCI bus that was common among desktop Pentiums because they weren't upgradeable anyway and the graphics performance on laptops was often bottlenecked by either a proprietary graphics chip outside any standard interface or an old ISA interface.
There are plenty of errors in the film, which is still a pretty enjoyable thing, IMO, to watch despite (and sometimes because) of them. There's no need to go looking for errors that aren't really there.
Slashdot Mirror
My point is the "were supposed to" is very vague. You could say they "were supposed to" back things up because they had a policy of backing up customer data on web and FTP sites as a courtesy. You could also say they "were supposed to" back things up if they were under contractual obligation to this specific client to have a certain percentage of data recovered, up to and including 100%.
The article doesn't specify, the summary doesn't specify, and unless I see an actual contract I sure as hell can't specify.
I believe you should be able to pay for that, too. But suing someone because they say "we backup our servers" and you think that means they guarantee 100% data retention is just the worst kind of careless oversight. If you find the ISP's website as I did and read the description of services and the ToS, there's no way an informed consumer would believe they are getting 100% guaranteed data backup. The company disclaims even being fit for use for any particular purpose.
The article its not very clear on that at all. It says they were supposed to back up the server. It doesn't say they were statutorily required to do so. It does not say they were contractually required to do so. It does not say they were required to successfully store the backup copies. It does not say they were required to perform a flawless recovery. It doesn't say what penalties for nonperformance or guarantee of service there would be.
I just read the ToS on the company's web site. It is suspicious that it says it's current as of April 1st... like maybe they changed it after the fact. But it does specifically say this ( lc()'ed to get past /. yelling filter, as this was all caps):
So even if they were responsible yesterday, they won't be in the future. It's a good faith effort, and you're still in charge of your own data in the end.
It's the mirroring part that provides the safety net. In fact, if you're using an ISP that doesn't state explicitly in their ToS that backups are your responsibility and that any backups they provide are a best-effort courtesy service then find yourself an ISP that'll still be in business in six months to move to. Yes, I've worked in the ISP and hosting biz. I have for over a decade, and I now work for one of the big boys.
There are plenty of things around your house that could run on hydrogen. It's a decent heating and cooking fuel. It's safer to have a 50-gallon tank of hydrogen in your house you can recharge nightly rather than a 1500 gallon tank of liquified petroleum gas sitting just outside it, filled twice a year by truck.
Fuck congested areas. It's easy to solve the mass transit problem for high-density areas. How are you going to run a train or bus around a town of 30,000 or smaller and make that economically feasible? People don't only travel to big cities.
Getting that sort of service into every home is going to do wonders for utility capacity planners. They'll be heavily recruited millionaires in no time.
One option is to use household current (including alt sources like wind and solar) to do electrolysis on water and have a hydrogen fuel-cell car. That way you get to have electric drive and fast fill without dumping high voltages across a charger. There's a little more household infrastructure for the storage tanks and such, and hydrogen fuel cell cars are rarer than plug-ins even though both are around.
You don't even need anything particularly special to produce diesel fuel. A few filters and readily available chemicals to treat some vegetable, grain, or nut oils is all it takes. Just don't drink the lye. ;-)
If you're using more than 35 or 40 horsepower to maintain cruising speed, you're doing something wrong or your minivan is especially broken. You use your torque mostly in low-end acceleration and your horsepower mostly in high-end acceleration. Many smaller cars require half of that to maintain speed once it's achieved, even with heavy steel frames and inefficiencies in planetary gearboxes, transaxles, and rear ends differentials. Your horsepower, unless otherwise stated, is at the engine crank for one thing. Electrics can drive the wheels directly without a clutch, gearbox, transaxle, and another set of gears.
Another option is a charging rail or inductive loop in the roads, but that doesn't seem at all practical. The car ferry replaces the need to rent an unfamiliar car at the far end, move all your bags from car to train to car, pay for parking your car at the train station, and plan ahead for the rental. It's a great option I've also been pushing for years, including to that silly White House "give us your ideas" website Obama had published when he first took office.
The big idea behind RISC was to design simpler processors in the first place so you could ramp up the clock rates. This is taking an existing chip and getting rid of portions of it. They're in the same ballpark, but not quite the same thing. Modern x86 chips were designed to be RISC with a CISC-to-RISC instruction decoder place in front, so it's kind of like that.
So you take offense to someone making a public document more public? That's what the kid did. He took a public document and made it more public. Kind of like Slashdot does, or your local newspaper. Fuck anyone who calls that illegal. Did he do it with the intention of harassing her? Is there a pattern of harassment? Those are questions for the court, maybe, but not for Slashdot to answer.
Not at all. I have ADHD and that page is annoying like people bitching about mosquitoes around their kids' stagnant wading pool. Life's full of hard problems. People need to fix the easy ones rather than bitch about them. Easy problems involve having a shit web page that annoys the hell out of people, and inviting the general public to a party. Fix the page and, revoke the public invitation or charge a nice hefty cover.
Unfortunately one of the hard problems in life is that there are people who think pages like that don't need fixing. Now that's a difficult one to change, short of licensing the use of web hosting or mass forced sterilization or something. Those just bring more problems with them, though. Someone stupid enough to invite world plus dog to a party probably think that page is slick and stylish, so it's going to remain annoying.
No, at a "fucking party" it's the guests who are fucking. That's why when you're using "fucking" as a superlative for "best", it gets attached to "best" and not "party", where it'd be an adjective instead. I fucking know these fucking words fucking used as fucking multiple different fucking parts of speech can be fucking confusing, so I'm fucking happy to fucking help you out in this fucking matter.
"or offend"... wow. Freedom of fucking speech got raped right there in every orifice. Australia, land of the whipped and home of the chained decides you're not allowed to offend? Fuck those pussies. I have the right to offend anyone I scatting well please, praise be to the NRA and the ACLU.
There, do you think they'll try to extradite me? I think that little tirade is offensive myself, but it had to be done for demonstrative purposes. If I didn't do it, it might not have been done.
"We are legion. We are everyone. We are noone. We are not your personal army."
That doesn't sound much like a card-issuing chartered club to me.
There were 6, 10, and even 20 Mbps radios ten years ago, but no home suer was paying for them. If you had a grain elevator or rock quarry out in the rolling country hills an needed a whole office online, it may be worth the cost. I he's getting those speeds to residential users now for anything less than hundreds of dollars a month, then more power to him and I'm thrilled for his customers. We actually cut costs quite a bit by using point-to-point 10 Mbps radios as short backhauls for the customers so we could run several towers from one PoP cabinet with all the lines coming into one demarc. With half a meg or so apiece, we could put 20 on a backhaul radio before even thinking of overselling. A few customers clsoe enough to the towers actually got as high as 800 Mbps, which at the time was a real bargain for that price.
What I'd really love to see in areas like that (like where my parents live, 7 miles from a town that's only 18,000 people to begin with) is people putting ready-to-plug BATMAN boxes on rooftop antenna masts and routing around the countryside from city to city in coops and buying bandwidth as a combined pool at multiple urban points around the edges of their rural service areas. The tech is almost ready. Now we just need to form the movement. It may even push into the cities someday if enough people get behind it.
I'm glad to see this guy doing this, but it's not exactly unprecedented. It was done on grain silos, grain elevators, water towers, leased space on other people's towers, and even on flagpoles all over rural Illinois and Missouri a decade ago. I worked for some ISPs that did this and did some of the server consulting work for more than one startup doing this, too. I wasn't the one climbing to do the radio work.
The startup cost for the customer is still pretty high for this sort of thing, usually around $200 to $275. Then it's typically $50 to $70 per month for around 400k to 600k down and 128k up or 256k or 512k symmetric, depending on which company and how far you are from their towers.
Frontier is putting 6Mbps DSL in lots of former Verizon territory in towns as small as 3,000 or 4,000 people. Only the really rural places will need this sort of thing in Frontier's areas soon, and it's much more expensive even with radio equipment to get the people on 80 and 120 acre or even larger plots miles from towns covered. That is, much more expensive compared to using the same radio towers closer in. It's still much cheaper than running new cables to all those customers.
It's not a perfect solution, but when weighed against dialup in the countryside or having to move closer in and change your lifestyle just for decent Internet access, a lot of people who don't prize low latencies and high throughputs as much as your typical Slashdotter will be happy to have it.
Damn smugglers. When cargo boats wouldn't do it, they got jet boats. Then they started using planes. Then submarines. How the hell is the Coast Guard supposed to interdict the shuttles or especially the Russian Soyuz capsules? ;-)
Everything is relative, isn't it, 1160051? ;-)
(Now for some 3-digit guy to come along and confirm that for me...)
It's now been tested in Chromium.
The q(') key moves the piece to the right. The enter key drops the piece. The space bar will also drop the piece if there's nowhere to scroll down on the page behind it. The arrow keys do nothing unless there's somewhere to scroll the page left or right, in which case they do.
It's currently unplayable on Chromium due to these issues, but it's still a pretty impressive demo.
Chromium version is 11.0.696.3 (dev) Mandriva 2010.2 for the record. I get the same results from Google Chrome 7.0.517.41 on the same system.
It works well in Opera.
Version information
Version: 11.01 Build: 1190
Platform: Linux System: x86_64, 2.6.36.2-desktop-2mnb
Browser identification: Opera/9.80 (X11; Linux x86_64; U; en) Presto/2.7.62 Version/11.01
Some of the lesser-known browsers:
So, I think there you have it. You support Firefox and Opera well right now. If you can figure out WebKit compatibility you should be able to waste everyone's time, as everyone should have at least one of Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Chromium, or Safari. If not, WebKit should also get those freaks with none of the mainstream browsers who happen to have Arora, Midori, or some other minor WebKit browser.
My Galeon installation is currently broken and not worth fixing with all these other browsers around, but I'm guessing it should work the same as a really old Firefox since it uses Gecko. I was unable to find a version of it newer than 2006 anyway, and that's ancient when talking about JavaScript in a browser. I read that the project was completely discontinued in 2008.
So, there's a testing report and a brief survey of the randomness installed on my systems for cross-browser testing purposes. HTH. HAND.
WarGames is much like The Matrix... or Fletch... or Caddy Shack... or The Karate Kid...
One of the best things to say is, "That was such an awesome movie. It's too bad they never made a sequel".
The fact that there was, indeed, a movie made to cash in on the original's success which is not worthy to be its sequel does not make the statement incorrect. It is, in fact, the very point. Making a movie with the same name and even some of the same characters that purports to take place some time farther along the timeline is not all it takes to classify as a sequel. The movie should also be in the same class of art.
BTW, remakes != sequels. The new Karate Kid (which may as well be called The Kung Fu Kid if it wasn't for the original) isn't ruled out by this.
I'd say the WOPR came close for unoffensive appearance of both the machine and the displays.
Heck, the systems in Star Wars (the original, now called "Star Wars: Episode IV, A New Hope") aren't that bad, either, considering all the tech around them. Star Wars wasn't even remotely about the computers, but they managed to get several things right. Why someone would put the power relay for a tractor beam on a narrow catwalk with no rail could only be explained by spartan budget constraints, but then again they were on an expensive battle station built to be capable of destroying worlds. They were probably already over budget. Don't try to sell me the old line about an astromech droid not being able to turn the power off to the garbage processing facilities. Who the hell keeps a maintenance man from turning off the waste disposals in the middle of your base for security purposes? Maybe the astromechs should have had voice synthesizers for when they weren't actually repairing a ship, but usually they are plugged into a socket. Besides, the interplay between C3PO and R2D2 is worth it. Why Star Wars isn't mentioned more often in threads like this, I'll never know. Droids for interpreters and maintenance tasks seem only natural progressions of computers and robotics.
There were, however, lots of Pentium MMX laptops. They also made Pentium II-based Celeron laptops and Pentium III and Pentium III-based Celeron laptops. Some people applied the "P6" moniker not only to the Pentium Pro, but also to the Pentium MMX, Pentium II (which was basically a Pentium Pro + MMX), and even up through the Pentium M and Pentium IV. The new families of chips since would be the Core, Core 2, and Core i series.
CNet confirms it.
Also, despite some poser on IMDB saying that the PCI bus underlaid all Pentium systems and that therefore the statement about the PCI bus affecting the screen refresh is wrong, not all Pentium systems in fact used the PCI bus. Some used VESA Local Bus, which was admittedly outdated. Some used EISA. IBM had MicroChannel (MCA). In fact, many laptops of the time didn't use the PCI bus that was common among desktop Pentiums because they weren't upgradeable anyway and the graphics performance on laptops was often bottlenecked by either a proprietary graphics chip outside any standard interface or an old ISA interface.
There are plenty of errors in the film, which is still a pretty enjoyable thing, IMO, to watch despite (and sometimes because) of them. There's no need to go looking for errors that aren't really there.