Just an FYI -ThinkPad T61 models have a magnesium cage, not an aluminum one.
I agree that Lenovo needs some work in their support department. However, I've owned a T61, and just bought a T400, which is, without a doubt, the finest laptop I've used (and I've used quite a few). Great features, built solid, and the best keyboard I could ask for on a laptop. Plus, Lenovo has tons of discount programs that brought my laptop several hundred dollars below what HP or Dell could offer.
I'll give Dell credit for having the best business support compared to Lenovo, and they make good laptops as well. And, I'd encourage you to call Lenovo customer service on the extended warranty thing. However, the product itself is pretty darned good, especially considering they cost half of what ThinkPads originally did under the IBM brand name.
McAfee Antivirus... Whose parent company website was formerly one giant mass of ads, including multiple pop-ups. Who makes online support as kludgy and difficult as possible, and requires you to create a user account to even manually download AV updates (so we can spam you with e-mail about our products. Whose software continually says it cannot uninstall because there are "files in use" as a smokescreen to prevent users from changing products, when far better programmers could just write the uninstall routine to stop all running McAfee services, which would fix the problem, and who uses scare tactics that insinuate you'll be completely unprotected (and likely to be molested).
Only one product I know of out-sucks Norton AV for home users --and it is McAfee.
People who wish to do illegal things will scoff at this law and do what they wish. They aren't concerned with being caught, and have no intention of reporting their findings anyway.
People who wish to do what is right will be prevented from doing so, as disclosure will land them in trouble, rather than fix problems. Soon, no-one will report problems, and those who wish to do what is right may no longer even research security flaws, due to the consequences of reporting their findings.
Tell me how law like this is good for anyone, other than criminals themselves?
As others have said, the new tests lower mileage on standard gasoline vehicles too.
More importantly though, there's a lot of details that get glossed over in hybrid/standard comparisons. They skip over the lower emissions of partial-zero emissions vehicles, how cost factors might even out sooner if gasoline prices continue to rise, and how if you're a high-mileage driver (especially a city driver) you may even out sooner in your purchase than others.
On the other hand, I bought a fuel-efficient gasoline car (Honda Civic EX sedan) two years back instead. I was able to buy it slightly used from a third-party and saved myself the depreciation (a used Prius, when you can find one, is still expensive due to the low depreciation of the vehicle). I can rely on non-dealer mechanics being able to service it, costing me less. And it's still an Ultra-Low Emissions Vehicle, and gets reasonable gas mileage, something I need considering I have an 80 mile round-trip commute.
-- Programming errors and inexperience dealing with electronic voting machines frustrated poll workers in hundreds of precincts early Tuesday, delaying voters in Indiana, Ohio and Florida and leaving some with little choice but to use paper ballots instead.
Well, I guess this eliminates the hacking option.;)
By the way, everyone, go out and vote today. Even if you don't agree with either party (which is where I often find myself), you have a chance to create some fun by giving a Republican president a Democrat congress.:)
The only reason they need the silly sixth blade for those "tricky areas" is because with five blades, the head of the razor is so freaking big you can't use it the way you'd use a Mach 3, which works just fine for the same areas without needing the "special blade". Classic case of creating additional problems by "innovating" requiring an even more complex solution.
Oh, and don't shave unless you're wearing slippers. Drop your Fusion, and that sixth blade can do one heck of a number on one of your toes (ouch).
Indeed; the only potentially iffy aspect is that public institutions use these filters. However, surely the complaint would be against those institutions, not the filtering companies. The institutions can attempt to persuade the companies to modify their filters, but ultimately it would be up to them to see that the measures they implement comply with the relevant laws, as they are the ones bound by them.
Considering that the federal Child Internet Protection Act (CIPA)requires the filters in order for many of these public institutions to receive federal funding, it creates an interesting conundrum, don't you think?
"The otherside of the arguement is that the proposed Vista lockout would leave M$ as the only suppliers of anti malware (Ok, so Symantic don't seem to agree, but I'm stating McAfee's aguement, not mine) and we are all aware of the dangers of a monoculture, especially one run by Seatle's finest.
What I want, if at all posible, is the choice to run which anti malware systems I choose."
If this is such a huge problem, as Symantec and McAfee suggest, then why do Avast!, eTrust, and TrendMicro, among others, already have products that work just fine in Vista (I'm running RC2 and have tested them) without needing access to PatchGuard or the kernel?
I'm inclined to believe that McAfee and Symantec are lazy, and want to cobble a new version of their existing products, rather than innovate and create something new. I also believe that MS opening up PatchGuard in this way makes it more vulnerable to any disgruntled programmer on Symantec or McAfee's teams, or anyone who would be prepared to divulge their knowledge of PatchGuard for a price.
This makes me kind of wish for a parking meter with a swipe-slot for an ATM/debit card, much like almost every gas pump has now. I'd rather feed the meter before I walk away from it, and like many, I usually don't have much change on me anymore.
Why is it so impossible to have paypal or other online bill pay regulated. I mean is it that hard to make paypal a real bank so they are held accountable.
PayPal doesn't WANT to be a bank, and unless they apply to become one, they won't be held to the same standards as one. They WANT to be an "online payment processing service", which exempts them from FDIC (in the current unlikely chance they fold, you lose any money stored there rather than getting up to $100k back like a bank) and from lots of rules and oversight that they don't want to do, because this way they can go on shafting those who use the service. As long as they're the only game in town, you get to play by their rules.
So, I am not sure if China and the U.S. are really all of that different today.
In the U.S. if content the government dislikes is printed or spoken by a journalist who chooses to do so, they don't end up sentenced to forced labor, or worse, end up with their family billed for the price of the bullet used to execute them.
I'd say there's more of a difference than you think.
Facebook has their college side set up where faculty and staff can create an account as well as the students. On the high school side, only if you're a student; no option for faculty/staff.
I e-mailed them once, since I administer an Internet filter in an educational environment, asking them if they would allow an option for high school staff to create an account just like they did with college faculty/staff. I've never received a reply.
I must say I'm surprised at the amount of money people manage to make selling warez. I can't imagine many of these look like the real thing
Prepare to be surprised.
Back when I worked in a computer store in the mid-to-late 90's, we took in a shipment of copies of Office 97 from a major vendor. As we unpacked them, a colleague and I looked and I said "Hmm, that's funny, the CD-key label looks a little grainy". The orange did look a little grainy, so we looked at the rest. The CD looked fine, printed the way it was supposed to, the jacket looked like Microsoft Office, but the logos looked just slighly less sharp around the edges than usual. We called up Microsoft, and it wasn't legit, so we sent them back to vendor.
Later, I found similar copies of Office 2000, holographic CD and all. Don't kid yourself; there's a market, even if you don't see it, and they look plenty real to Joe Sixpack.
Re:What ever happened to 2AM, $3 overnight shippin
on
A Look Inside Newegg
·
· Score: 1
What happened to cheap overnight shipping is that the price of both diesel and jet fuel has skyrocketed, costing major shippers more money to truck or fly your items from one place or another. It's caused quite an increase in shipping prices over the past few years; as long as oil is still the standard for fueling transportation, don't expect this to get any better.
Someone will get in, if they have access to your local intranet. It's that simple.
I'd bet everyone here has seen a picture of the USB flash drive disguised as a PEZ(tm) dispenser. What about the new Swiss Army Knife that has one built in? Heck, you could mod a USB drive to look like a Zippo or a Bic lighter. As others have said, I can't even see why camera phones are such a hot deal other than for their ability to take pictures; storing documents can be done in a far less noticeable way when there's access to USB ports.
The article uses Prohibition as a comparison...but Prohibition was not a product of corporate greed. It isn't like Coca-Cola and PepsiCo. got together and said "Let's find a way to prohibit alcoholic beverages so that we can control what America REALLY ought to drink --our product!"
Starting with a flawed analogy usually leads to a flawed article --as it did in this case.
At work, I generally wear a dress casual shirt (Eddie Bauer button-down in the winter, golf shirt in the summer) and jeans (I've managed to find a pair or two in khaki and black in addition to regular blue, in case there's a day I need to look a little dressier), and hiking boots.
I doubt most people who write editorials such as this have to:
a) Crawl on their hands and knees underneath desks to work on a user's PC b)troubleshoot cables in a dusty, messy wiring closet with sharp edges of racks and other equipment in the way c)clean out PC's with months of spiderwebs, dust bunnies, users' food crumbs, etc.
To top that off, I have a feeling that the snobs who write these articles are getting paid two to three times what I'm making, and buying a suit is nothing to them. Whereas I have a car payment (on a Honda Civic, not a BMW) and a mortgage on a small, but reasonable house, and yet it requires the income of myself and my wife to support it.
You want me to dress up? Raise my salary accordingly so I can afford it, and purchase robots that can fix things in areas where you wouldn't dare wear a suit. But wait...wouldn't that just be promoting me from the IT Dept. to...management? Perhaps people who write these articles should learn more about what such a job entails before they fashion police it.
And at least where I live, there are already laws against storing personally identifiable data in a database, such as your social security number. I guess age, gender, and other purely statistical data don't fall under this law, and I don't see a compelling reason to why it should. Is it really such a big deal?
Laws, feh. A good example here would be ChoicePoint, who wasn't supposed to store (according to agreements with parent credit card companies) personal information, and did anyway, for their own purposes. Now 140,000 people have had their personal information compromised. To quote (http://money.cnn.com/2005/02/17/technology/person altech/choicepoint/):
ChoicePoint said the criminals may have gained access to people's names, addresses, Social Security numbers and credit reports.
Do you think for a minute that all corporations care about your privacy laws, or further yet, that criminals care about the laws that say "You're not supposed to gain personal information illegally or use it to defraud others?
I'm not overly paranoid; I just know a really bad idea when I see one.
I've had far less problems with telemarketers since the Federal Do-Not-Call list came into existence. However, I have found that robo-calling has increased. A few of them are setups that call for a previous holder of my phone number because that person had an existing business relationship (i.e., gym membership, etc.) but many are deliberately designed to make tracking them difficult, so I cannot get them to stop calling. They might leave an 800-number to call them back, however it leads to a maze of people who have no ability to remove me from their calling list.
What bugs me even more is that I've heard rumors that some of these robo-call devices are programmed to only switch on and leave a message if your answering machine picks up; they can detect the difference between a human pickup and an answering machine. If this is the case, that'd really tick me off, both from being hung up on, but also getting the annoying messages. Rogue telemarketers aren't giving up 100%; they're just making it far more difficult to track them down.
Isn't this the way S3 does it every time? Let's see:
Step 1: S3 introduces a new graphics card. The name is similar to one they've previously made, but you've never seen that card before because no-one wants to produce and sell one. Specs seem similar too. As usual, it's supposed to be a mid-level card that won't "take on the big boys" but is supposed to have mainstream performance. Step 2: Hardware review sites get a prototype board. They either experience a number of driver glitches, or performance that is vanilla enough that no-one is all that excited. Step 4:Joe Gamer reads the review, and buys a tried-and-true midrange solution from ATI or nVidia that doesn't have the driver issues S3 was famous for in cards that actually made it out the door. Step 5: S3 has teething troubles with the GPU, or the drivers, or production, delaying the chip's release until its performance is at the low-end, yet priced $20-40 above others' low-end cards. Step 6: The lackluster performance of the GPU relegates it to boards made by one dinky little vendor nobody has heard of and doesn't trust, with nonexistent support. S3 has to lower their prices on the GPU to get any sales at all. Step 7: S3 doesn't profit.
I'm just curious...how does S3 manage to keep their graphics card business afloat? Aside from a few integrated solutions on VIA chipset mainboards, I can't see any products they manage to make money on.
Well, last election, I saw two major candidates put up for election here in the US. It was obvious that both would take the lions' share of the votes, and one would win, and that the others had no chance, and it was more obvious (in my mind) that neither was a prime example of someone I wanted to see running the country. Voting is a great thing, provided you can actually find people willing to support the ideals you wish to see, and that those people will gain enough donations (never happen, corporate lobbies are for themslves not the will of the people) and popular support among the US populace, a good percentage of whom don't care about politics.
Who did I vote for? I wrote in candidates. At this point, I'd like to see someone who stands for the Constitution as it was written and governs by what is morally right, rather than bickering over partisan differences and playing petty power games, or pandering to corporations instead of listening to the people. I'm not holding my breath; idealism and moralism seems to be in scant supply in politics these days.
Slashdot Mirror
Just an FYI -ThinkPad T61 models have a magnesium cage, not an aluminum one.
I agree that Lenovo needs some work in their support department. However, I've owned a T61, and just bought a T400, which is, without a doubt, the finest laptop I've used (and I've used quite a few). Great features, built solid, and the best keyboard I could ask for on a laptop. Plus, Lenovo has tons of discount programs that brought my laptop several hundred dollars below what HP or Dell could offer.
I'll give Dell credit for having the best business support compared to Lenovo, and they make good laptops as well. And, I'd encourage you to call Lenovo customer service on the extended warranty thing. However, the product itself is pretty darned good, especially considering they cost half of what ThinkPads originally did under the IBM brand name.
McAfee Antivirus...
Whose parent company website was formerly one giant mass of ads, including multiple pop-ups.
Who makes online support as kludgy and difficult as possible, and requires you to create a user account to even manually download AV updates (so we can spam you with e-mail about our products.
Whose software continually says it cannot uninstall because there are "files in use" as a smokescreen to prevent users from changing products, when far better programmers could just write the uninstall routine to stop all running McAfee services, which would fix the problem, and who uses scare tactics that insinuate you'll be completely unprotected (and likely to be molested).
Only one product I know of out-sucks Norton AV for home users --and it is McAfee.
People who wish to do illegal things will scoff at this law and do what they wish. They aren't concerned with being caught, and have no intention of reporting their findings anyway.
People who wish to do what is right will be prevented from doing so, as disclosure will land them in trouble, rather than fix problems. Soon, no-one will report problems, and those who wish to do what is right may no longer even research security flaws, due to the consequences of reporting their findings.
Tell me how law like this is good for anyone, other than criminals themselves?
As others have said, the new tests lower mileage on standard gasoline vehicles too.
More importantly though, there's a lot of details that get glossed over in hybrid/standard comparisons. They skip over the lower emissions of partial-zero emissions vehicles, how cost factors might even out sooner if gasoline prices continue to rise, and how if you're a high-mileage driver (especially a city driver) you may even out sooner in your purchase than others.
On the other hand, I bought a fuel-efficient gasoline car (Honda Civic EX sedan) two years back instead. I was able to buy it slightly used from a third-party and saved myself the depreciation (a used Prius, when you can find one, is still expensive due to the low depreciation of the vehicle). I can rely on non-dealer mechanics being able to service it, costing me less. And it's still an Ultra-Low Emissions Vehicle, and gets reasonable gas mileage, something I need considering I have an 80 mile round-trip commute.
-- Programming errors and inexperience dealing with electronic voting machines frustrated poll workers in hundreds of precincts early Tuesday, delaying voters in Indiana, Ohio and Florida and leaving some with little choice but to use paper ballots instead.
;)
:)
Well, I guess this eliminates the hacking option.
By the way, everyone, go out and vote today. Even if you don't agree with either party (which is where I often find myself), you have a chance to create some fun by giving a Republican president a Democrat congress.
The only reason they need the silly sixth blade for those "tricky areas" is because with five blades, the head of the razor is so freaking big you can't use it the way you'd use a Mach 3, which works just fine for the same areas without needing the "special blade". Classic case of creating additional problems by "innovating" requiring an even more complex solution.
Oh, and don't shave unless you're wearing slippers. Drop your Fusion, and that sixth blade can do one heck of a number on one of your toes (ouch).
Indeed; the only potentially iffy aspect is that public institutions use these filters. However, surely the complaint would be against those institutions, not the filtering companies. The institutions can attempt to persuade the companies to modify their filters, but ultimately it would be up to them to see that the measures they implement comply with the relevant laws, as they are the ones bound by them.
Considering that the federal Child Internet Protection Act (CIPA)requires the filters in order for many of these public institutions to receive federal funding, it creates an interesting conundrum, don't you think?
http://www.fcc.gov/cgb/consumerfacts/cipa.html
"The otherside of the arguement is that the proposed Vista lockout would leave M$ as the only suppliers of anti malware (Ok, so Symantic don't seem to agree, but I'm stating McAfee's aguement, not mine) and we are all aware of the dangers of a monoculture, especially one run by Seatle's finest.
What I want, if at all posible, is the choice to run which anti malware systems I choose."
If this is such a huge problem, as Symantec and McAfee suggest, then why do Avast!, eTrust, and TrendMicro, among others, already have products that work just fine in Vista (I'm running RC2 and have tested them) without needing access to PatchGuard or the kernel?
I'm inclined to believe that McAfee and Symantec are lazy, and want to cobble a new version of their existing products, rather than innovate and create something new. I also believe that MS opening up PatchGuard in this way makes it more vulnerable to any disgruntled programmer on Symantec or McAfee's teams, or anyone who would be prepared to divulge their knowledge of PatchGuard for a price.
The 7950GX2 is SLI on a card. It can only be made quad-SLI if you run TWO nVidia 7950GX2 cards, which was not done in this situation.
It may be a bad thing for MySpace...but if it's true, it sucks even more to be Rupert Murdoch. ;)
This makes me kind of wish for a parking meter with a swipe-slot for an ATM/debit card, much like almost every gas pump has now. I'd rather feed the meter before I walk away from it, and like many, I usually don't have much change on me anymore.
Why is it so impossible to have paypal or other online bill pay regulated. I mean is it that hard to make paypal a real bank so they are held accountable.
/ 75161
PayPal doesn't WANT to be a bank, and unless they apply to become one, they won't be held to the same standards as one. They WANT to be an "online payment processing service", which exempts them from FDIC (in the current unlikely chance they fold, you lose any money stored there rather than getting up to $100k back like a bank) and from lots of rules and oversight that they don't want to do, because this way they can go on shafting those who use the service. As long as they're the only game in town, you get to play by their rules.
There's a reason I no longer take PayPal on Ebay: see http://www.gripe2ed.com/scoop/story/2006/3/6/8326
In the U.S. if content the government dislikes is printed or spoken by a journalist who chooses to do so, they don't end up sentenced to forced labor, or worse, end up with their family billed for the price of the bullet used to execute them.
I'd say there's more of a difference than you think.
I e-mailed them once, since I administer an Internet filter in an educational environment, asking them if they would allow an option for high school staff to create an account just like they did with college faculty/staff. I've never received a reply.
Prepare to be surprised.
Back when I worked in a computer store in the mid-to-late 90's, we took in a shipment of copies of Office 97 from a major vendor. As we unpacked them, a colleague and I looked and I said "Hmm, that's funny, the CD-key label looks a little grainy". The orange did look a little grainy, so we looked at the rest. The CD looked fine, printed the way it was supposed to, the jacket looked like Microsoft Office, but the logos looked just slighly less sharp around the edges than usual. We called up Microsoft, and it wasn't legit, so we sent them back to vendor.
Later, I found similar copies of Office 2000, holographic CD and all. Don't kid yourself; there's a market, even if you don't see it, and they look plenty real to Joe Sixpack.
What happened to cheap overnight shipping is that the price of both diesel and jet fuel has skyrocketed, costing major shippers more money to truck or fly your items from one place or another. It's caused quite an increase in shipping prices over the past few years; as long as oil is still the standard for fueling transportation, don't expect this to get any better.
Someone will get in, if they have access to your local intranet. It's that simple.
I'd bet everyone here has seen a picture of the USB flash drive disguised as a PEZ(tm) dispenser. What about the new Swiss Army Knife that has one built in? Heck, you could mod a USB drive to look like a Zippo or a Bic lighter. As others have said, I can't even see why camera phones are such a hot deal other than for their ability to take pictures; storing documents can be done in a far less noticeable way when there's access to USB ports.
The article uses Prohibition as a comparison...but Prohibition was not a product of corporate greed. It isn't like Coca-Cola and PepsiCo. got together and said "Let's find a way to prohibit alcoholic beverages so that we can control what America REALLY ought to drink --our product!"
Starting with a flawed analogy usually leads to a flawed article --as it did in this case.
Why didn't they color the crash screen using Microsoft's trademark blue?
Duh. "Black Screen of Death" sounds SO much cooler, dude.
At work, I generally wear a dress casual shirt (Eddie Bauer button-down in the winter, golf shirt in the summer) and jeans (I've managed to find a pair or two in khaki and black in addition to regular blue, in case there's a day I need to look a little dressier), and hiking boots.
I doubt most people who write editorials such as this have to:
a) Crawl on their hands and knees underneath desks to work on a user's PC
b)troubleshoot cables in a dusty, messy wiring closet with sharp edges of racks and other equipment in the way
c)clean out PC's with months of spiderwebs, dust bunnies, users' food crumbs, etc.
To top that off, I have a feeling that the snobs who write these articles are getting paid two to three times what I'm making, and buying a suit is nothing to them. Whereas I have a car payment (on a Honda Civic, not a BMW) and a mortgage on a small, but reasonable house, and yet it requires the income of myself and my wife to support it.
You want me to dress up? Raise my salary accordingly so I can afford it, and purchase robots that can fix things in areas where you wouldn't dare wear a suit. But wait...wouldn't that just be promoting me from the IT Dept. to...management?
Perhaps people who write these articles should learn more about what such a job entails before they fashion police it.
I mean, why can't we just use herds of lunar sheep?
And at least where I live, there are already laws against storing personally identifiable data in a database, such as your social security number. I guess age, gender, and other purely statistical data don't fall under this law, and I don't see a compelling reason to why it should. Is it really such a big deal?
n altech/choicepoint/):
Laws, feh. A good example here would be ChoicePoint, who wasn't supposed to store (according to agreements with parent credit card companies) personal information, and did anyway, for their own purposes. Now 140,000 people have had their personal information compromised. To quote (http://money.cnn.com/2005/02/17/technology/perso
ChoicePoint said the criminals may have gained access to people's names, addresses, Social Security numbers and credit reports.
Do you think for a minute that all corporations care about your privacy laws, or further yet, that criminals care about the laws that say "You're not supposed to gain personal information illegally or use it to defraud others?
I'm not overly paranoid; I just know a really bad idea when I see one.
I've had far less problems with telemarketers since the Federal Do-Not-Call list came into existence. However, I have found that robo-calling has increased. A few of them are setups that call for a previous holder of my phone number because that person had an existing business relationship (i.e., gym membership, etc.) but many are deliberately designed to make tracking them difficult, so I cannot get them to stop calling. They might leave an 800-number to call them back, however it leads to a maze of people who have no ability to remove me from their calling list.
What bugs me even more is that I've heard rumors that some of these robo-call devices are programmed to only switch on and leave a message if your answering machine picks up; they can detect the difference between a human pickup and an answering machine. If this is the case, that'd really tick me off, both from being hung up on, but also getting the annoying messages. Rogue telemarketers aren't giving up 100%; they're just making it far more difficult to track them down.
Isn't this the way S3 does it every time? Let's see:
Step 1: S3 introduces a new graphics card. The name is similar to one they've previously made, but you've never seen that card before because no-one wants to produce and sell one. Specs seem similar too. As usual, it's supposed to be a mid-level card that won't "take on the big boys" but is supposed to have mainstream performance.
Step 2: Hardware review sites get a prototype board. They either experience a number of driver glitches, or performance that is vanilla enough that no-one is all that excited.
Step 4:Joe Gamer reads the review, and buys a tried-and-true midrange solution from ATI or nVidia that doesn't have the driver issues S3 was famous for in cards that actually made it out the door.
Step 5: S3 has teething troubles with the GPU, or the drivers, or production, delaying the chip's release until its performance is at the low-end, yet priced $20-40 above others' low-end cards.
Step 6: The lackluster performance of the GPU relegates it to boards made by one dinky little vendor nobody has heard of and doesn't trust, with nonexistent support. S3 has to lower their prices on the GPU to get any sales at all.
Step 7: S3 doesn't profit.
I'm just curious...how does S3 manage to keep their graphics card business afloat? Aside from a few integrated solutions on VIA chipset mainboards, I can't see any products they manage to make money on.
Vote?
Well, last election, I saw two major candidates put up for election here in the US. It was obvious that both would take the lions' share of the votes, and one would win, and that the others had no chance, and it was more obvious (in my mind) that neither was a prime example of someone I wanted to see running the country. Voting is a great thing, provided you can actually find people willing to support the ideals you wish to see, and that those people will gain enough donations (never happen, corporate lobbies are for themslves not the will of the people) and popular support among the US populace, a good percentage of whom don't care about politics.
Who did I vote for? I wrote in candidates. At this point, I'd like to see someone who stands for the Constitution as it was written and governs by what is morally right, rather than bickering over partisan differences and playing petty power games, or pandering to corporations instead of listening to the people. I'm not holding my breath; idealism and moralism seems to be in scant supply in politics these days.