Alex Joel is the information technology and e-business attorney for Marriott International, Inc. He is responsible for providing legal support on all technology and e-business related matters at Marriott on a worldwide basis. In addition to handling Marriott's information technology and telecommunications transactions (e.g., technology procurement, consulting engagements), Alex's legal responsibilities include: e-commerce, security, privacy, e-business ventures, online marketing, electronic standards and policies, and web site development and operations.
Before joining Marriott in April 1995, Alex was an attorney with the Washington, D.C. law firm of Shaw Pittman, where he spent three years negotiating technology transactions, primarily focusing on outsourcing deals. Before that, he was a captain in the U. S. Army Judge Advocate General's Corps, where he served first as a prosecutor, then as criminal defense counsel, and finally as a medical malpractice attorney.
Alex received his law degree magna cum laude from the University of Michigan Law School in 1987, where he was on the Michigan Law Review. He received his undergraduate degree magna cum laude from Princeton University in 1984.
Alex is a frequent speaker on the legal issues arising from doing business on the Internet.
As if the following quotes from the WSJ article were's bad enough:
When the NSA wiretapping program began, Mr. Joel wasn't working for the intelligence office, but he says he has reviewed it and finds no problems. The classified nature of the agency's surveillance work makes it difficult to discuss, but he suggests that fears about what the government might be doing are overblown.
"Although you might have concerns about what might potentially be going on, those potentials are not actually being realized and if you could see what was going on, you would be reassured just like everyone else," he says.
I've always been a *huge* fan of the IBM Thinkpads. They've never been the fastest or prettiest machines, and they are generally some of the most expensive, but the build quality far exceeds anything else out there. Even the "bargain" machines were built rather well.
I was excited to see that Lenovo would be selling their machines in local retail stores, so that I could actually get a hands-on for new machines without needing to track one down. But when I saw the machines in the local mega-office-store, they were without a doubt some of the flimsiest laptops I've ever seen. I've heard stories that the higher-end models are still constructed better, but there is no way I would *ever* buy a Lenovo laptop sight-unseen.
I'm quite certain I'm not the only one put off on the entire brand based on this...
-p.
If you're still using elm, you really ought to consider switching to mutt. Chances are you're running elm with the ME extensions. The ME stands for Michael Elkins, who went on to write mutt.
I started using elm way back in 1988 (yes, 18 years ago) and didn't switch to mutt until 2002 (or thereabouts.) My fingers were so conditioned to type "elm" for mail I had to create a shell alias from elm to mutt, and to this day, I still type elm to get into mail.
-p.
The story I heard was that a number of key Dell people defected to Alienware over the past year, and Dell acquired Alienware more to regain these people than the company or the brand. FWIW...
-a.
I used to be a *HUGE* fan of the Thinkpads, and was a little worried when I heard that IBM was selling off the brand. Those fears were confirmed when I saw some of the new Thinkpads in the local big-chain office supply store.
I typically judge the quality of a laptop by the quality of it's external construction, and the quality of the case on the new Thinkpad was one of the poorest I've ever seen in a laptop! I don't know if all the new Lenovo Thinkpads are this bad, but you can be sure that I'm not going to even think about ordering one of their higher-end machines without getting a chance to give it a thorough going over!
-p.
Dear Friend,
I am Mr Andrew Peter Worsley and I have an important business proposition for you.
On December 12th, 2001, while testing my Warp Drive (patent pending) transport, the ship was stranded in Galaxy N37 due to technical difficulties. The patent office is now demanding that I show it to them before they will approve my patent. But unfortunately, I spent my last penny developing the prototype!
As you can see, this patent would be very valuable, and recovering my ship would be a good business investment. I am currently lookinging for investors to gather the $35,273,000 needed to recover the ship.
etc, etc, etc...
Awaiting your urgent reply.
Thanks and regards.
My experience with the Nano hasn't been quite so good. I drove out to the local Apple Store several hours after they got their first shipment and came home with a 4G Nano in black. I opened it in the store, it powered up, but didn't have any songs pre-loaded, so I stuck it in my pocket and drove home.
When I got home, I was surprised to discover two things:
1. Just riding for an hour in my pocket with my cell phone scratched up the gorgeous clear plastic front.
2. The unit failed to power up reliably once I got home. I was able to hard-reset it a few times to gain limited functionality, and then it died completely.
I drove back to the store the following day, the techs there prounced it dead (after waiting for 45 minutes, grrr...) but they were out of the 4G black model. Not happy to settle for white or two gigs, I just got a refund.
I may, or may not, try again in the future. It sure is one sexy little toy, and it might still function after being run over by a car, but a screen that scratches so easily is completely unacceptable.
Very rarely do I lust after hardware the way I did with the iPod Nano. I have yet to purchase a portable MP3 player for various reasons, but the nano was the one for me. I drove up to the local Apple retail store, picked one up, opened it up, powered it up, and was very surprised to see that it didn't come pre-loaded with any tunes or pictures. *Sigh*, I'll have to wait until I get home to play with it.
When I got home, it wouldn't power up, but did respond to a reset. I was able to play a bit, and then it went into a "dark apple" screen. I figured the battery might be dead, so I installed the software but my Windoze PC didn't even recognize that a USB device was connected. I was able to reset the nano once more, but then it went back to the "dark apple" screen, where it now sits , unresponsive to any commands.
Grrr. I hope this isn't a repeat of the *last* piece of apple hardware I purchased, a PowerBook 5300...
-p.
Cool concept, but if it's not going to be a direct copy of the original PCB, doing the clone in VHDL on an FPGA would so the same thing, and be a fair bit easier.
I'm curious just what are the chips on the original Apple I that are no longer available...
It's sure looking like the MacMini was designed to be the iPod of PVRs. No doubt that's where Apple is going. But why do they need TiVo? There isn't anything technical that Apple can't do as good if not better. Apple as enough name cred already to introduce their own product. Acquiring TiVo won't garner a large share of the market. Gotta wonder what's going on here....
One quick note about RAID5 that not many people are aware of... If you lose *one* disk, you can recover everything. If you lose *two* disks, you had better have backup tapes, because that's the only way you can recover.
Given the cheap cost of disk these days, RAID 0+1 / RAID 10 is something you really ought to at least consider.
If you don't want to fork out for a generator you'll only use a few times a year, you can build a rather inefficient one quite cheaply. Obtain a used lawnmower engine (3.5 - 6 HP vertical shaft is perfect) and a 60-100 amp alternator w/ internal regulator from a large car or truck. (I scored six free lawnmowers in the first week I started looking, and alternators are $20/ea at the local u-pull junkyard)
Get a 12" x 18" piece of 3/16" steel plate, screw in 2x6s to levate it off the ground, bolt on the motor and alternator. You'll need a 5" pulley for the motor shaft (a few more bucks at the junkyard) and then you are good to go.
Fire up the engine and you've got somewhere between 700 - 1400 watts at 14 VDC. Use this to power an invertor (a cheap modified square wave unit is just fine for PC switching power supplies) to get 240 VAC.
I've got a system like this and it works great. Total cost of parts was about $50, and I already had the invertor. I'm currently working on adding a microcontroller to replace the dumb regulator in the alternator, and then I'll be replacing the mechanical governor on the engine with a stepper motor on the throttle, so then the engine can be throttled down to the minimum RPMs needed to meet demand. (No, it's not profitable once you factor in the time spent, but this is what I do for FUN!)
While you may never see any problems running PCs with cheap power supplies on a daily basis, they often suffer catostrophic failure after six months or more of use. I had one machine that ran flawlessly as my home server for over a year but one day when I was re-running power cables (exterior to the case) the power supply literally exploded when I powered the machien back up, destroying ever single component inside! Since I've started talking about this, I have found that something similar has happened to quite a number of people. And ever since, I have used nothing but higher quality power supplies.
BTW, the worst case was a guy who had build a large IDE raid box. He figured he didn't need backups because he had RAID and the likelyhood of losing two drives at the same time was pretty low -- or so he thought. When his PS blew, it took *all* of the drives (and all of his data) with it.
Can you say suck-o-rama? I knew you could...
Slashdot Mirror
I've always been a *huge* fan of the IBM Thinkpads. They've never been the fastest or prettiest machines, and they are generally some of the most expensive, but the build quality far exceeds anything else out there. Even the "bargain" machines were built rather well. I was excited to see that Lenovo would be selling their machines in local retail stores, so that I could actually get a hands-on for new machines without needing to track one down. But when I saw the machines in the local mega-office-store, they were without a doubt some of the flimsiest laptops I've ever seen. I've heard stories that the higher-end models are still constructed better, but there is no way I would *ever* buy a Lenovo laptop sight-unseen. I'm quite certain I'm not the only one put off on the entire brand based on this... -p.
If you're still using elm, you really ought to consider switching to mutt. Chances are you're running elm with the ME extensions. The ME stands for Michael Elkins, who went on to write mutt. I started using elm way back in 1988 (yes, 18 years ago) and didn't switch to mutt until 2002 (or thereabouts.) My fingers were so conditioned to type "elm" for mail I had to create a shell alias from elm to mutt, and to this day, I still type elm to get into mail. -p.
The story I heard was that a number of key Dell people defected to Alienware over the past year, and Dell acquired Alienware more to regain these people than the company or the brand. FWIW... -a.
Thinkpads have been made in China for quite some time now, including the ones of exceptional quality.
I used to be a *HUGE* fan of the Thinkpads, and was a little worried when I heard that IBM was selling off the brand. Those fears were confirmed when I saw some of the new Thinkpads in the local big-chain office supply store. I typically judge the quality of a laptop by the quality of it's external construction, and the quality of the case on the new Thinkpad was one of the poorest I've ever seen in a laptop! I don't know if all the new Lenovo Thinkpads are this bad, but you can be sure that I'm not going to even think about ordering one of their higher-end machines without getting a chance to give it a thorough going over! -p.
Dear Friend, I am Mr Andrew Peter Worsley and I have an important business proposition for you. On December 12th, 2001, while testing my Warp Drive (patent pending) transport, the ship was stranded in Galaxy N37 due to technical difficulties. The patent office is now demanding that I show it to them before they will approve my patent. But unfortunately, I spent my last penny developing the prototype! As you can see, this patent would be very valuable, and recovering my ship would be a good business investment. I am currently lookinging for investors to gather the $35,273,000 needed to recover the ship. etc, etc, etc... Awaiting your urgent reply. Thanks and regards.
My experience with the Nano hasn't been quite so good. I drove out to the local Apple Store several hours after they got their first shipment and came home with a 4G Nano in black. I opened it in the store, it powered up, but didn't have any songs pre-loaded, so I stuck it in my pocket and drove home.
When I got home, I was surprised to discover two things:
1. Just riding for an hour in my pocket with my cell phone scratched up the gorgeous clear plastic front.
2. The unit failed to power up reliably once I got home. I was able to hard-reset it a few times to gain limited functionality, and then it died completely.
I drove back to the store the following day, the techs there prounced it dead (after waiting for 45 minutes, grrr...) but they were out of the 4G black model. Not happy to settle for white or two gigs, I just got a refund.
I may, or may not, try again in the future. It sure is one sexy little toy, and it might still function after being run over by a car, but a screen that scratches so easily is completely unacceptable.
-p.
Very rarely do I lust after hardware the way I did with the iPod Nano. I have yet to purchase a portable MP3 player for various reasons, but the nano was the one for me. I drove up to the local Apple retail store, picked one up, opened it up, powered it up, and was very surprised to see that it didn't come pre-loaded with any tunes or pictures. *Sigh*, I'll have to wait until I get home to play with it. When I got home, it wouldn't power up, but did respond to a reset. I was able to play a bit, and then it went into a "dark apple" screen. I figured the battery might be dead, so I installed the software but my Windoze PC didn't even recognize that a USB device was connected. I was able to reset the nano once more, but then it went back to the "dark apple" screen, where it now sits , unresponsive to any commands. Grrr. I hope this isn't a repeat of the *last* piece of apple hardware I purchased, a PowerBook 5300... -p.
what more needs to be said?
Cool concept, but if it's not going to be a direct copy of the original PCB, doing the clone in VHDL on an FPGA would so the same thing, and be a fair bit easier. I'm curious just what are the chips on the original Apple I that are no longer available...
It's sure looking like the MacMini was designed to be the iPod of PVRs. No doubt that's where Apple is going. But why do they need TiVo? There isn't anything technical that Apple can't do as good if not better. Apple as enough name cred already to introduce their own product. Acquiring TiVo won't garner a large share of the market. Gotta wonder what's going on here....
... it beats the oddds and does
If you've got ssh and access to a server outside of china the rest should be pretty obvious...
Given the cheap cost of disk these days, RAID 0+1 / RAID 10 is something you really ought to at least consider.
-p.
-p.
doncha know!
Get a 12" x 18" piece of 3/16" steel plate, screw in 2x6s to levate it off the ground, bolt on the motor and alternator. You'll need a 5" pulley for the motor shaft (a few more bucks at the junkyard) and then you are good to go.
Fire up the engine and you've got somewhere between 700 - 1400 watts at 14 VDC. Use this to power an invertor (a cheap modified square wave unit is just fine for PC switching power supplies) to get 240 VAC.
I've got a system like this and it works great. Total cost of parts was about $50, and I already had the invertor. I'm currently working on adding a microcontroller to replace the dumb regulator in the alternator, and then I'll be replacing the mechanical governor on the engine with a stepper motor on the throttle, so then the engine can be throttled down to the minimum RPMs needed to meet demand. (No, it's not profitable once you factor in the time spent, but this is what I do for FUN!)
-p.
you mean like this: http://www.spynumbers.com/cdrom.html ????
$ lynx -dump 'http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=89873&cid =0&pid=0&startat=&threshold=-1&mode=flat&commentso rt=0&op=Change' | grep -ic gigli
2
agh!
BTW, the worst case was a guy who had build a large IDE raid box. He figured he didn't need backups because he had RAID and the likelyhood of losing two drives at the same time was pretty low -- or so he thought. When his PS blew, it took *all* of the drives (and all of his data) with it. Can you say suck-o-rama? I knew you could...
-p.
Yup, that's what my brain saw. Not wedding, welding.
There is a reason that disclaimer is on the ticket...
http://stories.about.ticketstubs.org/story.stub/41