Well, the whole 'sued for negligence' issue does raise the point that these laptops are NOT going to end up on eBay. One expensive lawsuit serves as an example and IT Staffs all around the world will be equipped with bandsaws and a slackjawed operator whose job is to decomission old machines.
You know, it isn't a Federal law that BIOS has to be contained in Flash memory. It doesn't even have to be in a socketed chip. With the volume of PCs that gets churned out these days it can be soldered down onto the motherboard and conformal coated. I can't think of a reason why it wouldn't be in a case like this. They're certainly not going to make it flashable, and there ain't going to be a handy little chip puller tucked away inside the case either.
Naw. Cordoba. I can't understand why none of the motorheads are resurrecting the '73 Chrysler Cordoba. With faux corintian leather interior and a vinyl roof that's flaking off rust. American cars from the era when the fender was prone to rust off from the inside out, leaving a flaking chrome veneer 'fender' in the end.
BIOS doesn't have to be contained on a Flash chip, you know. It doesn't even have to be a socketed EPROM. Systems are cheap these days and the BIOS could easily be a masked ROM in a fine pitch package and soldered to the board. Under epoxy if necessary. It isn't like the average corporate IT site is gonna reflash the BIOS on their workstations. At the minimum it's something they'll no longer expect to be able to do on this class of machine.
Any 'smart' laptop thieve is the exception and not who this tool is designed to 'bust.'
It's designed to nail the lowlife at the airport who wouldn't know what to do with the laptop if he did actually open it up and turn it on. He turns it in at the hock shop (you've seen 'em- the ones with the big sign on front 'we buy laptops for CASH' whose windows geeks should just bust out regularly) and uses the $16 he gets to buy crack.
Microsoft has always only had good products (relatively speaking) when they've been in a competetive market. It took the 'threat' of Netscape for them to get their act together on the Browser scene. A lot of the quality of Windows 2000 can be attributed to them feeling the heat from competing x86 operating systems being forced to come out with something at least as good. Lord knows why things cooled off enough that the best they could do after W2K was XP, though....
Borland used to have a 'like a book' license for their compilers. The rule was that you could have the compiler on as many machines as you liked, but 'like a book' it could only be 'read' on one machine at a time. It made a lot of sense, particularly with developers who might do tweaking and debugging on multiple target machines.
The horrors of it! Now you're dividing by six! Didn't you know you're supposed to divide everything in multiples of ten? I wouldn't let the committee find out about your indiscretion....
Luddite? Seriously, you're going to make a charge like that?
I attacked the Standard Kilogram with a sledge hammer, to protect 'the traditional ounce users' in their villages?
Utterly ridiculous.
This is purely a flamefest about measuring-unit-chavaunism, and there's NO single right answer, because the units-of-measure used are IRRELEVANT to progress. It's just an inconvenience we all have to suffer because of political differences.
The Metric system of units and measures comes out of the noodle-head 'Revolutionary' period of France. The period when the Marquis DeSade was considered an intellectual, etc. etc.
Please learn your history and stop detracting from the real history of the Metric system. It was pulled whole-cloth out of a specific historical period and a specific 'revolutionary' movement.
You should have seen the sour look on the woman from Red Hat Marketing's face when I asked her, back in the day, if I could just make copies of my Red Hat 5.0 CD set and give them to my friends.
I understand they have gotten even more business oriented since then....
Personally, I think that the alphabetical order should be randomly re-established every year by edict of the government. Robust resorting functionality would quickly be built into all software. The full employment it would insure for the software industry alone would be worth the hassle.
And it would be so much more fair for all the schoolchildren whose names are stuck at one end or the other of the roll call.
Base 12 makes more sense because it allows the unit (the foot) to be divided evenly into 3 or 4 parts. It's the same reason that the dozen is a popular unit of measure. Think in human scale, instead of the abstract way a 'revolutionary committee' did in 18th Century France. (their renumbering of the calendar starting again at year one sure fizzled... as did most of the other nonsense they conjured up)
I can't think of anything more ludicrous than basing a whole set of measures on the number of digits on a particular primate's hands.
It is perilous to only consider your opponents in parody form. You'd be surprised at how many times doing so will end up in your defeat in an arguement. You really should consider reasonable alternatives to your position. Engaging in arguements with your own self-created scarecrow opponents just amounts to mental masturbation.
So you're conceeding the arguement. Okay. We agree that neither Microsoft Office or OpenOffice use a non-proprietary format for their default save format.
It would help if either Office Suite had a readily available switch in it's config to set the default save format to RTF or some other non-proprietary format. But since both office suites are fighting a 'holy war to dominate the desktop' neither does.
It's now time for a Mac advocate to chime in about how Dell was just copying another Apple initiative. The iMac had no floppy drive long before it became the default Dell config.
I've often thought that Microsoft would be wise to offer binary drivers that offer native support for Ex2fs and the other popular Linux filesystem partitions. Without any security features, of course.
A few nice plugins like that, maybe even to work on an MS-DOS boot floppy that Johnny Kracker can take into any server room he has access to.....
I think Microsoft Word for DOS was up to about version 3.0 by then, too. The 'great merge' of the DOS/Windows and Mac versions of Word hadn't happened yet, though. Lotus was still king of the spreadsheets, and Wordperfect was still king of the Word Processors. Word and Excel were DOS/Mac things that goofy renegades ran.
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Well, the whole 'sued for negligence' issue does raise the point that these laptops are NOT going to end up on eBay. One expensive lawsuit serves as an example and IT Staffs all around the world will be equipped with bandsaws and a slackjawed operator whose job is to decomission old machines.
You know, it isn't a Federal law that BIOS has to be contained in Flash memory. It doesn't even have to be in a socketed chip. With the volume of PCs that gets churned out these days it can be soldered down onto the motherboard and conformal coated. I can't think of a reason why it wouldn't be in a case like this. They're certainly not going to make it flashable, and there ain't going to be a handy little chip puller tucked away inside the case either.
Umm, it's my tagline.
And once it's narrowed down to what city you're in.... ummm... wow. It's in Cleveland somewhere. That's gonna help find it.
Where are these consent forms? Does Slashdot fill one out and fax it to each site that they link to?
You're one hell of a rough fish. I think I'll throw you back.
Naw. Cordoba. I can't understand why none of the motorheads are resurrecting the '73 Chrysler Cordoba. With faux corintian leather interior and a vinyl roof that's flaking off rust. American cars from the era when the fender was prone to rust off from the inside out, leaving a flaking chrome veneer 'fender' in the end.
Still, it's a great name for a web browser.
BIOS doesn't have to be contained on a Flash chip, you know. It doesn't even have to be a socketed EPROM. Systems are cheap these days and the BIOS could easily be a masked ROM in a fine pitch package and soldered to the board. Under epoxy if necessary. It isn't like the average corporate IT site is gonna reflash the BIOS on their workstations. At the minimum it's something they'll no longer expect to be able to do on this class of machine.
Laptop thieves are largely a stupid lumpen lot.
Any 'smart' laptop thieve is the exception and not who this tool is designed to 'bust.'
It's designed to nail the lowlife at the airport who wouldn't know what to do with the laptop if he did actually open it up and turn it on. He turns it in at the hock shop (you've seen 'em- the ones with the big sign on front 'we buy laptops for CASH' whose windows geeks should just bust out regularly) and uses the $16 he gets to buy crack.
Microsoft has always only had good products (relatively speaking) when they've been in a competetive market. It took the 'threat' of Netscape for them to get their act together on the Browser scene. A lot of the quality of Windows 2000 can be attributed to them feeling the heat from competing x86 operating systems being forced to come out with something at least as good. Lord knows why things cooled off enough that the best they could do after W2K was XP, though....
Borland used to have a 'like a book' license for their compilers. The rule was that you could have the compiler on as many machines as you liked, but 'like a book' it could only be 'read' on one machine at a time. It made a lot of sense, particularly with developers who might do tweaking and debugging on multiple target machines.
Really, isn't that just a case of external linking, and clearly okay with the slashdot community, seeing as we supported 2600.com?
The horrors of it! Now you're dividing by six! Didn't you know you're supposed to divide everything in multiples of ten? I wouldn't let the committee find out about your indiscretion....
Luddite? Seriously, you're going to make a charge like that?
I attacked the Standard Kilogram with a sledge hammer, to protect 'the traditional ounce users' in their villages?
Utterly ridiculous.
This is purely a flamefest about measuring-unit-chavaunism, and there's NO single right answer, because the units-of-measure used are IRRELEVANT to progress. It's just an inconvenience we all have to suffer because of political differences.
The Metric system of units and measures comes out of the noodle-head 'Revolutionary' period of France. The period when the Marquis DeSade was considered an intellectual, etc. etc.
Please learn your history and stop detracting from the real history of the Metric system. It was pulled whole-cloth out of a specific historical period and a specific 'revolutionary' movement.
You should have seen the sour look on the woman from Red Hat Marketing's face when I asked her, back in the day, if I could just make copies of my Red Hat 5.0 CD set and give them to my friends.
I understand they have gotten even more business oriented since then....
Personally, I think that the alphabetical order should be randomly re-established every year by edict of the government. Robust resorting functionality would quickly be built into all software. The full employment it would insure for the software industry alone would be worth the hassle.
And it would be so much more fair for all the schoolchildren whose names are stuck at one end or the other of the roll call.
Base 12 makes more sense because it allows the unit (the foot) to be divided evenly into 3 or 4 parts. It's the same reason that the dozen is a popular unit of measure. Think in human scale, instead of the abstract way a 'revolutionary committee' did in 18th Century France. (their renumbering of the calendar starting again at year one sure fizzled... as did most of the other nonsense they conjured up)
I can't think of anything more ludicrous than basing a whole set of measures on the number of digits on a particular primate's hands.
It is perilous to only consider your opponents in parody form. You'd be surprised at how many times doing so will end up in your defeat in an arguement. You really should consider reasonable alternatives to your position. Engaging in arguements with your own self-created scarecrow opponents just amounts to mental masturbation.
What's a jackass penguin, by the way?
Tell a rowdy football crowd in a tavern in London that they can't have their pint of beer.
So you're conceeding the arguement. Okay. We agree that neither Microsoft Office or OpenOffice use a non-proprietary format for their default save format.
It would help if either Office Suite had a readily available switch in it's config to set the default save format to RTF or some other non-proprietary format. But since both office suites are fighting a 'holy war to dominate the desktop' neither does.
It's now time for a Mac advocate to chime in about how Dell was just copying another Apple initiative. The iMac had no floppy drive long before it became the default Dell config.
'as long as you can save from Microsoft Word to RTF format, why is anyone complaining?'
Pot.
Kettle.
Black.
An open office file is a zipped XML archive.
Wow. You just validated what he said. How do you get anything useful out of a corrupted 'zipped XML archive' using a text editor?
Also, your anti-floppy-disk snobbery just kicked up a duststorm of dissent. Don't try rhetoric like that when you're trying to convert people.
I've often thought that Microsoft would be wise to offer binary drivers that offer native support for Ex2fs and the other popular Linux filesystem partitions. Without any security features, of course.
A few nice plugins like that, maybe even to work on an MS-DOS boot floppy that Johnny Kracker can take into any server room he has access to.....
I think Microsoft Word for DOS was up to about version 3.0 by then, too. The 'great merge' of the DOS/Windows and Mac versions of Word hadn't happened yet, though. Lotus was still king of the spreadsheets, and Wordperfect was still king of the Word Processors. Word and Excel were DOS/Mac things that goofy renegades ran.