Really? I did not have such good luck with them. On mine, the hinges holding the LCD screen to the body of the laptop came loose. And I don't mean the sort of "loose" you can fix with a screwdriver. For a while I could prop up the LCD, but eventually the LCD stopped working (well, obviously).
Thinkpad quality has been in my experience pretty mixed. My employer has bought them for the last 7-8 years. The models I've used/have supported/have heard about:
380D/380XD: Solid as a rock. We still occasionally send these to customer sites as appliances.
390/390X: These were just awful. Virtually every one who had one of these eventually had some sort of hardware issue. For instance, on mine the hinges eventually came loose from the body of the machine--and I typically don't do anything more serious than open and close it two or three times a day. I think I had the motherboard replaced a couple of times, too.
A21: I went through two of these. The screen crapped out on the first one after a year or so. From what I gather, overall we had some problems with these, but not too many.
I wasn't disagreeing with that--only your contention that you found it "very hard to believe that anyone interested in 'virtualization' would not know the pros and cons of the various unices."
I have to disagree tdhat people intererested in virtualization have to be knowledgeable about Linux/Unix. My employer is a VMWare partner (albeit a small one). One of our consultants gave an internal training session a couple of weeks ago. He told me that a lot of his customers are Windows shops, and they're interested in Windows almost entirely. He's a Windows guy himself, so it makes sense that most of his customers aren't interested in Linux/Unix.
Why? There seem to be two big drivers: server consolidation and disaster recovery. You can clone key machines as virtual machines, and store them off site (either on a VMWare server [or the Microsoft product] or just as flat files). When your main data center is hit by an asteroid, you can run your business off the virtual machines instead.
With VMWare, there are also some other neat futures (like vMotion).
I have not had such great luck with lm_sensors. I usually run IBM hardware (not a lot of choice in the matter), and it wasn't until pretty recently that you could get lm_sensors to work on a lot of it. This seems to have a lot to do with the corruption issues lm_sensors initially had with Thinkpads--the developers seem to have been (justifiably) skittish about IBM hardware. The versions of lm_sensors packaged with the distributions we use (enterprise versions of SUSE and Red Hat) have also been well behind the current versions that work. It's been much easier to just use IBM Director for that sort of thing--and did I mention I hate IBM Director?
FYI, here's a better reason why it's silly to argue that Dell doesn't make PCs: because we have evidence that Dell makes PCs. Dell has factories. Dell has designers. You can visit the factories and meet the designers.
Now, now. The Institute for Creation Research has its headquarters and a museum in Santee, California, which looks like suburban San Diego. The El Tejon school district north of LA also was in the news for a "Philosophy of Design" course a minister's wife had planned to teach. The Discovery Institute's headquarters are in Seattle (the Discovery Institute is a big supporter of Intelligent Design). There have been school districts in Oregon and Washington which have also wanted to teach Intelligent Design.
I suspect you could find other examples of this in upstate New York and and other northern coastal areas if you wanted to look, but I really don't. I will assume you were going to saw off Georgia and the other southern coastal states.
Excellent point. If there is anything to this--and I'm skeptical--then it's a good indication that the standard models are in serious need of revision.
On another note, I don't really understand all the negativity about this. I see four possibilities here:
Fleischmann is deluded, but has still managed to convince people that there's something there. Investors lose their money.
Fleischmann knows there's nothing to it, and the company is an elaborate con. Investors lose their money. I would be surprised if this were the case--couldn't he find easier ways of doing this?--but I can't eliminate it out of hand. There are plenty of other cons out there, nothing special about this one (if it is indeed a con).
Fleischmann has actually found something, which may or may not be cold fusion, but it's not commercially viable. Investors lose their money.
Fleischmann has actually found something, and it's commercially viable. Investors make a lot of money.
If they can make something worthwhile out of this, more power to them. No way in hell would I invest in it, though. The only investors who should put money into this are already obscenely wealthy and can afford to lose it all.
Read the link--this was a joke. (Hint: Adobe added banknote image detection, blocking.)
I agree with you about the Gimp, though. For instance, LAB support is there, but it sucks (no preview), and I use LAB a lot. I would love to run Photoshop on Linux, but I don't see it happening.
When the tax preparer does your taxes. "List" probably isn't the best choice of words here (and I assume this is what you were objecting to), but they do have to compile a list of stock trades and the capital gains for each and stick it in a schedule somewhere.
At the local Walmart, if you use a debit card at the register you have to enter your PIN with these large keys. It wouldn't be that hard to watch somebody enter their PIN in line at the register, then grab their wallet or purse on the way out. You could have a partner perform the actual theft, so you're not too easily associated with the crime. Heck, you might be able to get PINs from the security camera.
Presumably your credit card was out of your sight for a few minutes. It doesn't take very long to write down your name, the number, and the expiration date. I imagine they could have used a custom card swiper or something more efficient.
I had something similar happen to me after a trip to the Philly area a couple of years ago. Shortly after I returned, I discovered that someone had used one of my cards to spend a couple of grand on something like "broadband services" from AOL. I had used it at a couple of restaurants and a gas station; I hadn't used it online recently, although I suppose someone could have gotten the number from a stored transaction a few months before that.
But how often do you allow someone into your machine? For A desktop, not often, perhaps never.
While this is a fair point, many root compromises happen in two parts. First someone gets shell access as a non-priviliged user through a hole in some service, or through a compromised account. Then they use some local privilege escalation attack to become root.
The fact that OS X doesn't run ssh by default is good for desktop users, who aren't going to be running a lot of services which can be compromised. Nonetheless, local exploits are still a problem.
For instance, apparently there was a recent OS X vulnerability where a malicious web site could execute arbitrary code when you visited it (with Safari). I don't know how easy this would be to exploit, but it could probably be used in conjunction with a local exploit to compromise a desktop.
That's actually a very good question. There is a large amount of evidence for common descent. I don't have time to go into it right now, but you could take a look at (for instance) the www.talkorigins.org web site.
However, there is nothing that would have prevented life from arising at multiple times some groups of organisms have different ancestors. There are any number of reasons why we don't see multiple lineages of life.
First, the conditions under which life originated may not exist now. This isn't as far-fetched as it seems, since evidence suggests that conditions on the earth prior to the presence of life were dramatically different.
Second, let's suppose that the conditions aren't so different and life has formed many times. The newly formed organisms would have to compete against organisms that have already adapted to the same environment. Already existing organisms are going to have a big advantage.
Third, there may already have been multiple different lineages of life. However, the other lineages were out-competed and didn't survive to the present day.
Look at this logically for a minute. Upon the discovery of soft tissue inside a T. Rex's bones, what should we throw out?
Evolution
The geologic time scale
Our assumptions about fossilization
The tissue was inside the bone, and they had to chemically remove the hard minerals before they could take a look at the soft tissues preserved. So I think it's pretty reasonable to say number three, our assumptions about fossilization, is the thing we should be looking at changing.
It's funny how quick people are to throw out evolution.
Most likely humans had most impact on the predator population when they started raising domesticated livestock. Since systematic extermination of predators has an obvious benefit.
Which was long after both the period discussed in the article, and thousands of years after the extinction of megalafauna ~10K years ago.
Well, yes, I could have been clearer. According to what I've read, the Minoan language (the one written in Linear A, anyway) is most likely unknown in the sense that it's probably not related to any living language family. It's been suggested that it's related to Etruscan, which nobody understands either.
This is opposed to the possibility that Minoan is either some language we already know or related to a known language. For instance, people have proposed that Minoan is (very) archaic Greek or Phoenician, but none of these ideas seemed to have gotten much traction.
Linear A and B are used for writing different languages. Linear A, the older of them is in a undeciphered language which is clearly not related to Greek or any other indo-european language. Linear B has clearly been shown to be Greek by Michael Ventris et al. Therefore we can assert that at least the minoan elite spoke Greek.
Linear A doesn't appear until after the apparent collapse of Minoan civiliation (see the Wikipedia article, which seems to be pretty good. Conquest by Greek speakers is consistent with the evidence.
Let me remind you 'Grammiki A' and 'Grammiki B' (Linear A and B), two forms of written language in the Southern part of Greece that bears no resemblance to later Greek language.
Uh, Linear B was in fact Greek. Linear A, on the other hand, has never been deciphered (and is presumed to be an unknown language).
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No. But that's different because, uh, well, see, uh, it just is, you dirty pinko commie Islamofascist! And--and--and Michael Moore is fat!
Really? I did not have such good luck with them. On mine, the hinges holding the LCD screen to the body of the laptop came loose. And I don't mean the sort of "loose" you can fix with a screwdriver. For a while I could prop up the LCD, but eventually the LCD stopped working (well, obviously).
Now, the 380D's and 380XD's were rock solid.
You only have one account?
I wasn't disagreeing with that--only your contention that you found it "very hard to believe that anyone interested in 'virtualization' would not know the pros and cons of the various unices."
Why? There seem to be two big drivers: server consolidation and disaster recovery. You can clone key machines as virtual machines, and store them off site (either on a VMWare server [or the Microsoft product] or just as flat files). When your main data center is hit by an asteroid, you can run your business off the virtual machines instead.
With VMWare, there are also some other neat futures (like vMotion).
I have not had such great luck with lm_sensors. I usually run IBM hardware (not a lot of choice in the matter), and it wasn't until pretty recently that you could get lm_sensors to work on a lot of it. This seems to have a lot to do with the corruption issues lm_sensors initially had with Thinkpads--the developers seem to have been (justifiably) skittish about IBM hardware. The versions of lm_sensors packaged with the distributions we use (enterprise versions of SUSE and Red Hat) have also been well behind the current versions that work. It's been much easier to just use IBM Director for that sort of thing--and did I mention I hate IBM Director?
FYI, here's a better reason why it's silly to argue that Dell doesn't make PCs: because we have evidence that Dell makes PCs. Dell has factories. Dell has designers. You can visit the factories and meet the designers.
I suspect you could find other examples of this in upstate New York and and other northern coastal areas if you wanted to look, but I really don't. I will assume you were going to saw off Georgia and the other southern coastal states.
If the people who know physics wrote the SEC filing, they're definitely in trouble.
Excellent point. If there is anything to this--and I'm skeptical--then it's a good indication that the standard models are in serious need of revision.
On another note, I don't really understand all the negativity about this. I see four possibilities here:
If they can make something worthwhile out of this, more power to them. No way in hell would I invest in it, though. The only investors who should put money into this are already obscenely wealthy and can afford to lose it all.
You're kidding! I actually run COO. I didn't think they had any version of Photoshop running. Shows what I know.
Read the link--this was a joke. (Hint: Adobe added banknote image detection, blocking.) I agree with you about the Gimp, though. For instance, LAB support is there, but it sucks (no preview), and I use LAB a lot. I would love to run Photoshop on Linux, but I don't see it happening.
When the tax preparer does your taxes. "List" probably isn't the best choice of words here (and I assume this is what you were objecting to), but they do have to compile a list of stock trades and the capital gains for each and stick it in a schedule somewhere.
At the local Walmart, if you use a debit card at the register you have to enter your PIN with these large keys. It wouldn't be that hard to watch somebody enter their PIN in line at the register, then grab their wallet or purse on the way out. You could have a partner perform the actual theft, so you're not too easily associated with the crime. Heck, you might be able to get PINs from the security camera.
I had something similar happen to me after a trip to the Philly area a couple of years ago. Shortly after I returned, I discovered that someone had used one of my cards to spend a couple of grand on something like "broadband services" from AOL. I had used it at a couple of restaurants and a gas station; I hadn't used it online recently, although I suppose someone could have gotten the number from a stored transaction a few months before that.
While this is a fair point, many root compromises happen in two parts. First someone gets shell access as a non-priviliged user through a hole in some service, or through a compromised account. Then they use some local privilege escalation attack to become root.
The fact that OS X doesn't run ssh by default is good for desktop users, who aren't going to be running a lot of services which can be compromised. Nonetheless, local exploits are still a problem.
For instance, apparently there was a recent OS X vulnerability where a malicious web site could execute arbitrary code when you visited it (with Safari). I don't know how easy this would be to exploit, but it could probably be used in conjunction with a local exploit to compromise a desktop.
It would be real easy for the flight crew to stop you from talking on your cel phone while you're in the bathroom.
However, there is nothing that would have prevented life from arising at multiple times some groups of organisms have different ancestors. There are any number of reasons why we don't see multiple lineages of life.
First, the conditions under which life originated may not exist now. This isn't as far-fetched as it seems, since evidence suggests that conditions on the earth prior to the presence of life were dramatically different.
Second, let's suppose that the conditions aren't so different and life has formed many times. The newly formed organisms would have to compete against organisms that have already adapted to the same environment. Already existing organisms are going to have a big advantage.
Third, there may already have been multiple different lineages of life. However, the other lineages were out-competed and didn't survive to the present day.
It's been this bad for a long time. If he had thrown in some random cAPITALizATION, I might have thought he was serious.
The tissue was inside the bone, and they had to chemically remove the hard minerals before they could take a look at the soft tissues preserved. So I think it's pretty reasonable to say number three, our assumptions about fossilization, is the thing we should be looking at changing.
It's funny how quick people are to throw out evolution.
Which was long after both the period discussed in the article, and thousands of years after the extinction of megalafauna ~10K years ago.
This is opposed to the possibility that Minoan is either some language we already know or related to a known language. For instance, people have proposed that Minoan is (very) archaic Greek or Phoenician, but none of these ideas seemed to have gotten much traction.
Linear A doesn't appear until after the apparent collapse of Minoan civiliation (see the Wikipedia article, which seems to be pretty good. Conquest by Greek speakers is consistent with the evidence.
Let me remind you 'Grammiki A' and 'Grammiki B' (Linear A and B), two forms of written language in the Southern part of Greece that bears no resemblance to later Greek language. Uh, Linear B was in fact Greek. Linear A, on the other hand, has never been deciphered (and is presumed to be an unknown language).