I realize this is a highly subjective area but I think the above poster has either not used a thinkpad recently or has had some serious problems with IBM in the past.
I currently use (R51) and purchase IBM/Lenovo Thinkpads for my company (T-30, T-40/42 and one X somthing). Over the years I have used and purchased other brands such as Gateway, Toshiba, Sharp and HP. 7 years ago I got my first Thinkpad A20m and have since that day forward been buying thinkpads.
When I think of buying a corporate laptop for a sales person the LAST thing on my mind is "looks". I want a rugged, well built, well supported and most of all reliable laptop. After all when they are 1200 miles away in a board room making a sale the last thing they need is a good looking pile of crap that won't boot. I currently support more than 30 Thinkpads of all shapes and sizes. I have only sent two in for repairs. One was dropped down a flight of concrete stairs and the other decided it wanted a rum and coke... Both were repaired and returned within 5 business days. No screens have failed, no drives have failed and these are all in the field laptops not desktop riders.
Most of my sales people hadn't used Thinkpads prior to working with this company and now many of them have sworn off the likes of Dell and HP. There are several sizes of thinkpads for those that want small and light, or like myself big and powerful (I'm young, I can lug it). I think all but the X series now have both the nipple and a touch pad. Very convienent once you learn how to use them at the same time.
I'll grant you that for a home user a thinkpad may not be the best option. They don't have Widescreens or Dolby Surround sound or 900 different Flash slots on them. They do run Linux quite well. I have installed Suse, Fedora and others on mine over the last year.
Lenovo has been making thinkpads for some time now, even before the sale. In fact current thinkpads come in a Lenovo box but still have the IBM branding on the machine. There are no lenovo stickers or logos on the actual laptop. I will continue to buy them so long as they remain reliable and well supported.
My first computer was an Apple II+ (my dad had passed it down to me after he upgraded to a IIe). Hour and hours and hours of Three Mile Island later I was a born computer nerd.
My first real machine was PC clone 486sx25 with 80megabyte HDD. That computer got me into PC upgrades and repair that became a career. I remember waiting hours for morph to run...
Yes they did prove it...at least my college physics prof did by using a hypothetical line 1 foot above your head carring an impossible amout of power (1 million volts or somthing silly like that). The magnetic field generated by the line was several orders of magnitude less than the magnetic field of the earth which you are exposed to at all times.
Also the cell phone brain cancer thing is becoming less and less likely.
If global warming exists it will not cause stronger hurricanes, in fact it will weaken them.
The warming occures at the poles, melting the ice caps, this in turn pumps COLD water throughout the rest of the oceans resulting in an overall decline in sea temperature. Go read some of the theories. There may be pockets of warmer oceans such as the gulf of mexico but overall a global warming trend would decrease the ocean temps and reduce the severity of hurricanes.
Great! Pretty soon parents won't ever have to interact with their children, a talking computer will do it all for them!
My wife is 8 months pregnant and has arranged her life and job to allow her to stay home with the child and then work part time as a nanny and bring the child with her.
Why the hell would anyone just toss a talking pen at a kid and leave them be? Why not instead sit down with them and HELP them learn. Computers don't help anyone learn anything. They are merely a delivery device.
I'm a Sys Admin, I have 4 computers in my home, my child won't have his or her own computer until Highschool at best. Learning tool my ass, the only they help you learn is how to download music and pr0n.
Keyboards have been my biggest complaint for many years. My home keyboard is one I got used off of and old Pentium 60 Zeos corp computer. Its AT, it has a full click in the keys (not quite as full as the classic IBM keyboards of old) and the larger enter key. For my needs this is the best keyboard out there. I type faster and with less mistakes.
At work I have another AT style keyboard gotten from a garage sale for 2 bucks. It has 12 extra programable function keys, a build in calculator and of course the full click and larger enter key.
A trip to my local Compusa shows me about 12 different keyboards and all of them suck with one exception. The exception is a keyboard with removed sidebar number pad in a metalic base (heavy, nice) and it is basically a notebook keyboard. Flat keys with a short throw click..it sells for $250 !!! One day it will be mine.
Strangly my expierence with Blackberry has been the complete opposite.
The BES server integrated seemlessly into my exchange and SQL server. Worked right out of the box. There was a problem syncing Outlook 2003 but Service Pack 3 for the desktop software (now up to version 4) fixed that. My company has 20 blackberries and not one of them has been broken by the end user. We have had 2 with bad flash roms which caused them to lock up at random times but they were replaced under warranty. I have personally dropped my blackberry from heights of 5ft or more to concrete and blacktop more than a dozen times. Got some road rash but no real damage. We have been using these devices both in the US and internationally for more than a year and all 20 users are Berry berry satisfied.:)
Does a treo integrate seemlessly into an Exchange mail server though? The beauty of the Blackberry and blackberry server software is that you didn't have to use any forwarding rules and secondary email servers or addresses. Emails sent to and from my BB are infact right out of my exchange server profile.
Perhaps the Treo's work this way as well but I don't see how that can be without some other form of server side software designed to work with the devices and the Service provider.
This little beauty tells me it probably doesn't work that way "3 Email, messaging and web browsing require wireless data services from a mobile service provider at an additional cost. ISP may also be required. Pricing varies by service provider. Wireless service coverage may not be available in all areas."
The BES server integrates into your existing Exchange server, and uses its bandwidth for mobile data and email transmission. You don't have to pay extra for a data link. You also get neat things like Idokorro's Admin product that allows me to manage my servers from my handheld. Granted there are probabaly forms of this product for the Treo and other handhelds I just haven't looked yet.
I'll give you that the Treo is probably a better sounding phone as I've been rather disapointed with the sound of mine, but overall I think its a step back from what blackberry is offering.
What I'd like to see are more Windows based phones. MS has announced a FREE (as in beer) upgrade to Exchange which will give it BB style messaging built in. But it requires (of course) a windows based phone to use it.
Anyway, I like my BB, and i like what it offers. I have not found a better offering yet for the price and easy of use.
I see your points, and they may indeed be valid and somthing worth worrying about but I think we are looking at these "problems" with only a human eye. The human eye doesn't properly account for time in the realm of millions or even billions of years.
Megafauna may well die off, only to be replaced in a million years by new fauna. During that time the earth may cool and other species will grow to fill the gap and niche now open.
The decline of Cheeta's as you point out may well be directly caused by man's hunting and habitat encroachment but I think its important to see humans as just another species on earth. If the population of elephants suddenly exploded and large forested areas were eaten and trodded down the cheeta may well have declined in that scenario.
I guess the whole idea I'm trying to push forward here is that man IS a species of this planet, one that takes habitat from other species, one that hunts other species. While we have the control and thought processes to prevent ourselves from completely anhilating those things who's to say that 10 million years from now other species won't fill the voids we have created, and or replace us.
Nature and evolution are huge, in the past two weeks we have read stories about birds and plants long thought to be extinct being found again. There is a very large cycle going on around us, we are but queens on the chess board. In control of all, but still part of the game.
So can anyone tell me where it says things aren't supposed to go this way? Is there some master book of the Earth that describes appropriate time lines for temperatures and species die-off?
I'm just wondering how it is we know all these thing to be bad, and or in need of correction. Perhaps its just simply the fact that doom sells, and scientist need money to continue their work?
I'm not for raping the planet, but then again I don't see how we are doing anything other than that which we were designed/destin to do.
Why? My ID has my picture and my signature on it. The teller can verify by my valid ID that I am who my ID says I am. Then when I sign the receipt they can check my signature against the ID.
Now you'll tell me "but you can create ID's to match stolen cards" How is that any different than fordging a signature on a stolen card and not have the teller even LOOK at an ID to see if I am who I say I am?
The illusion of security is complete, fact of the matter is if one WANTS to, one can use a stolen CC until someone complains to the compay and the # is shut down.
Just keep an eye on your bills and make sure you report any problem ASAP.
As soon as I can bike 14.5 miles (23.3k) along side a major highway in the dead of a minnesota winter and still have enough energy to do any meaningfull work I will.
Until then, I'll drive my fairly effecient car and not freeze to death.
Wow, I guess Saddam went from an evil dictator killing hundreds of thousands in innocent people to just some poor schmuck the US and UN took down because they didn't like him.
Amazing how we forget the little things in our rush to vilify the US and President Bush.
Iraq was invaded for many reasons, possibibly building WMD's was one small reason. Violating 14 UN resolutions was another, scaming the Oil for Food program to build palaces and weapons factories was another, paying the families of suicide bombers was another...not to mention the genocide of the sunis.
I don't see any parrallel there to NK at all. Well except for all the evil dictator thing, and the killing of the people, and the production of WMDs, and the violation of UN and US treaties. Yea, we should just leave poor Kim alone, he's got soo much on his plate right now.
One catch is that proceedures like these only work on people who could see for at least a few years of thier lives. People born blind do not develop the necessary linkage in the brain to decode these signals later in life. Their brains literally do not know how to see.
Correct, the will to better one's self and environment is very strong in humans.
In a "communal" environment the incentive to do better is removed because you do not get to keep the fruits of your labor, thus eventually people only do enough to get by. At that point soicalism fails and communisim starts.
The leaders then have to build walls to keep people in and kill others to keep them from speaking out against the norm.
Awesome review, without any pictures or screen shots I imagine this to the best monitor ever. Since there is no price mentioned it must be under 100 dollars, and I only have to wait 3-5 years to get one that will last more than a month.
bet *now* they'll upgrade, but until this particularly hairy situation arose, they didn't really see a need to upgrade a computer scheduling system that had been working great for them.
RTFA RTFA RTFA - The new system goes live in January. Good god its like herding cats around here.
Gotta love/. when you can get moded +5 insightful without RTFA AND posting verbal vomit....
So contrary to the reviewers comment you'd use the device for illegal purposes?
The point was if you are using wireless access points legaly then you don't need this device. You already know where the networks are and how to connect to them.
Its like trying all the door handles up and down a street without having to get out of your car and look like a thief, only the act is the same.
What is the point of this device if you need some sort of computer to access the network anyway?
I use the IBM connections manager on my thinkpad to scan for networks. It then displays a list of all the networks it finds. Tells me SSID, Type (a/b/g) and WEB secured or not. I select one and hit connect.
Seems like this is a solution looking for a problem.
Already happens. When I flew to Vegas last month there were at least 10 people watching DVD's on those portable players WITHOUT headphones. They'd just crank it up as high as it could go to hear over the engines/cabin noise. Made reading a book near impossible.
Am I the only one who files with at least 2 pair of headphones and a splitter so the person next to me can enjoy my movie too?
Slashdot Mirror
I realize this is a highly subjective area but I think the above poster has either not used a thinkpad recently or has had some serious problems with IBM in the past.
I currently use (R51) and purchase IBM/Lenovo Thinkpads for my company (T-30, T-40/42 and one X somthing). Over the years I have used and purchased other brands such as Gateway, Toshiba, Sharp and HP. 7 years ago I got my first Thinkpad A20m and have since that day forward been buying thinkpads.
When I think of buying a corporate laptop for a sales person the LAST thing on my mind is "looks". I want a rugged, well built, well supported and most of all reliable laptop. After all when they are 1200 miles away in a board room making a sale the last thing they need is a good looking pile of crap that won't boot. I currently support more than 30 Thinkpads of all shapes and sizes. I have only sent two in for repairs. One was dropped down a flight of concrete stairs and the other decided it wanted a rum and coke... Both were repaired and returned within 5 business days. No screens have failed, no drives have failed and these are all in the field laptops not desktop riders.
Most of my sales people hadn't used Thinkpads prior to working with this company and now many of them have sworn off the likes of Dell and HP. There are several sizes of thinkpads for those that want small and light, or like myself big and powerful (I'm young, I can lug it). I think all but the X series now have both the nipple and a touch pad. Very convienent once you learn how to use them at the same time.
I'll grant you that for a home user a thinkpad may not be the best option. They don't have Widescreens or Dolby Surround sound or 900 different Flash slots on them. They do run Linux quite well. I have installed Suse, Fedora and others on mine over the last year.
Lenovo has been making thinkpads for some time now, even before the sale. In fact current thinkpads come in a Lenovo box but still have the IBM branding on the machine. There are no lenovo stickers or logos on the actual laptop. I will continue to buy them so long as they remain reliable and well supported.
My first computer was an Apple II+ (my dad had passed it down to me after he upgraded to a IIe). Hour and hours and hours of Three Mile Island later I was a born computer nerd.
My first real machine was PC clone 486sx25 with 80megabyte HDD. That computer got me into PC upgrades and repair that became a career. I remember waiting hours for morph to run...
Yes they did prove it...at least my college physics prof did by using a hypothetical line 1 foot above your head carring an impossible amout of power (1 million volts or somthing silly like that). The magnetic field generated by the line was several orders of magnitude less than the magnetic field of the earth which you are exposed to at all times.
Also the cell phone brain cancer thing is becoming less and less likely.
If global warming exists it will not cause stronger hurricanes, in fact it will weaken them.
The warming occures at the poles, melting the ice caps, this in turn pumps COLD water throughout the rest of the oceans resulting in an overall decline in sea temperature. Go read some of the theories. There may be pockets of warmer oceans such as the gulf of mexico but overall a global warming trend would decrease the ocean temps and reduce the severity of hurricanes.
Stop listening to the retards on CNN..
Great! Pretty soon parents won't ever have to interact with their children, a talking computer will do it all for them!
My wife is 8 months pregnant and has arranged her life and job to allow her to stay home with the child and then work part time as a nanny and bring the child with her.
Why the hell would anyone just toss a talking pen at a kid and leave them be? Why not instead sit down with them and HELP them learn. Computers don't help anyone learn anything. They are merely a delivery device.
I'm a Sys Admin, I have 4 computers in my home, my child won't have his or her own computer until Highschool at best. Learning tool my ass, the only they help you learn is how to download music and pr0n.
Keyboards have been my biggest complaint for many years. My home keyboard is one I got used off of and old Pentium 60 Zeos corp computer. Its AT, it has a full click in the keys (not quite as full as the classic IBM keyboards of old) and the larger enter key. For my needs this is the best keyboard out there. I type faster and with less mistakes.
At work I have another AT style keyboard gotten from a garage sale for 2 bucks. It has 12 extra programable function keys, a build in calculator and of course the full click and larger enter key.
A trip to my local Compusa shows me about 12 different keyboards and all of them suck with one exception. The exception is a keyboard with removed sidebar number pad in a metalic base (heavy, nice) and it is basically a notebook keyboard. Flat keys with a short throw click..it sells for $250 !!! One day it will be mine.
Strangly my expierence with Blackberry has been the complete opposite.
:)
The BES server integrated seemlessly into my exchange and SQL server. Worked right out of the box. There was a problem syncing Outlook 2003 but Service Pack 3 for the desktop software (now up to version 4) fixed that. My company has 20 blackberries and not one of them has been broken by the end user. We have had 2 with bad flash roms which caused them to lock up at random times but they were replaced under warranty. I have personally dropped my blackberry from heights of 5ft or more to concrete and blacktop more than a dozen times. Got some road rash but no real damage. We have been using these devices both in the US and internationally for more than a year and all 20 users are Berry berry satisfied.
YMMV I guess.
Does a treo integrate seemlessly into an Exchange mail server though? The beauty of the Blackberry and blackberry server software is that you didn't have to use any forwarding rules and secondary email servers or addresses. Emails sent to and from my BB are infact right out of my exchange server profile.
Perhaps the Treo's work this way as well but I don't see how that can be without some other form of server side software designed to work with the devices and the Service provider.
This little beauty tells me it probably doesn't work that way "3 Email, messaging and web browsing require wireless data services from a mobile service provider at an additional cost. ISP may also be required. Pricing varies by service provider. Wireless service coverage may not be available in all areas."
The BES server integrates into your existing Exchange server, and uses its bandwidth for mobile data and email transmission. You don't have to pay extra for a data link. You also get neat things like Idokorro's Admin product that allows me to manage my servers from my handheld. Granted there are probabaly forms of this product for the Treo and other handhelds I just haven't looked yet.
I'll give you that the Treo is probably a better sounding phone as I've been rather disapointed with the sound of mine, but overall I think its a step back from what blackberry is offering.
What I'd like to see are more Windows based phones. MS has announced a FREE (as in beer) upgrade to Exchange which will give it BB style messaging built in. But it requires (of course) a windows based phone to use it.
Anyway, I like my BB, and i like what it offers. I have not found a better offering yet for the price and easy of use.
I bought a TI-92 (the VHS tape sized graphing machine) for Calc/physics in college and it always had this function.
That was in 1996.
Calculators don't make kids less intelligent or less able to do math, poor teaching and poorer books do.
I see your points, and they may indeed be valid and somthing worth worrying about but I think we are looking at these "problems" with only a human eye. The human eye doesn't properly account for time in the realm of millions or even billions of years.
Megafauna may well die off, only to be replaced in a million years by new fauna. During that time the earth may cool and other species will grow to fill the gap and niche now open.
The decline of Cheeta's as you point out may well be directly caused by man's hunting and habitat encroachment but I think its important to see humans as just another species on earth. If the population of elephants suddenly exploded and large forested areas were eaten and trodded down the cheeta may well have declined in that scenario.
I guess the whole idea I'm trying to push forward here is that man IS a species of this planet, one that takes habitat from other species, one that hunts other species. While we have the control and thought processes to prevent ourselves from completely anhilating those things who's to say that 10 million years from now other species won't fill the voids we have created, and or replace us.
Nature and evolution are huge, in the past two weeks we have read stories about birds and plants long thought to be extinct being found again. There is a very large cycle going on around us, we are but queens on the chess board. In control of all, but still part of the game.
So can anyone tell me where it says things aren't supposed to go this way? Is there some master book of the Earth that describes appropriate time lines for temperatures and species die-off?
I'm just wondering how it is we know all these thing to be bad, and or in need of correction. Perhaps its just simply the fact that doom sells, and scientist need money to continue their work?
I'm not for raping the planet, but then again I don't see how we are doing anything other than that which we were designed/destin to do.
"These days, AMD is the singlemost important chip maker on the planet, second only to Intel."
/me dies
Does not compute, systems overloading...
Why? My ID has my picture and my signature on it. The teller can verify by my valid ID that I am who my ID says I am. Then when I sign the receipt they can check my signature against the ID.
Now you'll tell me "but you can create ID's to match stolen cards" How is that any different than fordging a signature on a stolen card and not have the teller even LOOK at an ID to see if I am who I say I am?
The illusion of security is complete, fact of the matter is if one WANTS to, one can use a stolen CC until someone complains to the compay and the # is shut down.
Just keep an eye on your bills and make sure you report any problem ASAP.
As soon as I can bike 14.5 miles (23.3k) along side a major highway in the dead of a minnesota winter and still have enough energy to do any meaningfull work I will.
Until then, I'll drive my fairly effecient car and not freeze to death.
Wow, I guess Saddam went from an evil dictator killing hundreds of thousands in innocent people to just some poor schmuck the US and UN took down because they didn't like him.
Amazing how we forget the little things in our rush to vilify the US and President Bush.
Iraq was invaded for many reasons, possibibly building WMD's was one small reason. Violating 14 UN resolutions was another, scaming the Oil for Food program to build palaces and weapons factories was another, paying the families of suicide bombers was another...not to mention the genocide of the sunis.
I don't see any parrallel there to NK at all. Well except for all the evil dictator thing, and the killing of the people, and the production of WMDs, and the violation of UN and US treaties. Yea, we should just leave poor Kim alone, he's got soo much on his plate right now.
One catch is that proceedures like these only work on people who could see for at least a few years of thier lives. People born blind do not develop the necessary linkage in the brain to decode these signals later in life. Their brains literally do not know how to see.
Ramsey Electronics Has tons of DIY FM kits, and even some very high end professional equipment.
They also have tons of other hobby kits for electronics.
Correct, the will to better one's self and environment is very strong in humans.
In a "communal" environment the incentive to do better is removed because you do not get to keep the fruits of your labor, thus eventually people only do enough to get by. At that point soicalism fails and communisim starts.
The leaders then have to build walls to keep people in and kill others to keep them from speaking out against the norm.
Awesome review, without any pictures or screen shots I imagine this to the best monitor ever. Since there is no price mentioned it must be under 100 dollars, and I only have to wait 3-5 years to get one that will last more than a month.
Gosh I just can't wait!
bet *now* they'll upgrade, but until this particularly hairy situation arose, they didn't really see a need to upgrade a computer scheduling system that had been working great for them.
/. when you can get moded +5 insightful without RTFA AND posting verbal vomit....
RTFA RTFA RTFA - The new system goes live in January. Good god its like herding cats around here.
Gotta love
So contrary to the reviewers comment you'd use the device for illegal purposes?
The point was if you are using wireless access points legaly then you don't need this device. You already know where the networks are and how to connect to them.
Its like trying all the door handles up and down a street without having to get out of your car and look like a thief, only the act is the same.
What is the point of this device if you need some sort of computer to access the network anyway?
I use the IBM connections manager on my thinkpad to scan for networks. It then displays a list of all the networks it finds. Tells me SSID, Type (a/b/g) and WEB secured or not. I select one and hit connect.
Seems like this is a solution looking for a problem.
Already happens. When I flew to Vegas last month there were at least 10 people watching DVD's on those portable players WITHOUT headphones. They'd just crank it up as high as it could go to hear over the engines/cabin noise. Made reading a book near impossible.
Am I the only one who files with at least 2 pair of headphones and a splitter so the person next to me can enjoy my movie too?
You've ever delt with the crappy ass software Semantic sells.
Veritas goes to Semantic and I dump Veritas with a vengance.
Ultrabac does the same stuff with a lot smaller install, and for less money.
Now can I please get a 10 or 20 gig IPod for $99?
Bastards.