Bleh. When will Toast come out of the dark ages and support even half of the advanced features that burners can do these days?
Image-on-media? Kinda dumb, but no, can't do it. Media compatibility check? Nope. Report on confidence of burn success? Nope. Accurate time estimation? Nope. Statistics on disk readability? Phbt, dream on.
I will say this- Toast used to be the best burning program around, PC or Mac. Now, it's quite clearly been eclipsed. In fact, nothing on the Macintosh platform comes close in terms of support for advanced features on todays' drives.
"Need to be taken out back of the Interweb and beaten to within an inch of their lives. Twice."
Make that three- they (and many other advertisers and other sites) needlessly set cookie expiration dates to 2040 and whatnot; I wouldn't mind it so much if they didn't collect like a plague; every few weeks I go through my cookie list and there are literally thousands of cookies from a hundred different advertisers all set to expire in a zillion years. It's absurd, and clearly they don't get it- these cookies should have an expiration of maybe one year at the absolute most. A month or so should be fine in most cases.
I think someone should write a plugin for the various free browsers that punishes bad cookie lifetime params- maybe it inversely sets the actual expiration date in an inverse fashion if the requested date is too far off. For example, over a year, start actually going back down for each year they add. So a cookie marked good until 2040 will actually be good for about a few hours- or less.
Users will bitch, site developers will be forced to look at why it's happening, and the answer from the internet community will be "set more reasonable cookie expiration dates and it won't happen". They'll be in the uncomfortable position of trying to explain why they need such long dates.
Either that or simply allow the user to set a maximum cookie retention time. What I'd REALLY like is a browser that doesn't save cookies for sites I haven't bookmarked, or combine the ideas- cookies for sites not bookmarked aren't saved very long.
I'll give someone $5 if they can do this with a VW beetle radiator:P
I'll give them $20 if they manage to do it with a VW beetle.
and a slightly more cynical view...
on
The Cult of Mac
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
...has been in my sig for months. It's not mine, but it's hysterical.
As a mac user, btw, I'd like to say that there are so many stereotypes that are simply not true about many Mac users.
Not all of us are rabid evangelists(I grew out of that when I was 16)
Not all of us think a computer is some life-changing gee-golly piece of technology. It's my computer. I do stuff on it. That's it. Buying a mac doesn't change your life, or more accurately, it -shouldn't- change your life.
Not all of us think it's "Mac or nothing". I use the best tool for the job. My powerbook is my system; I serve stuff using Linux. I have a PC in the corner for games other than the really big stuff that gets ported to the Mac.
Not all of us think Steve's the greatest.
I'm constantly amazed by how many stereotypes there are of Macintosh users, and it's actually quite offensive sometimes. "Oh, you're a MAC GUY, I see....our PCs aren't GOOD ENOUGH for you" is what invariably follows. Most of the time, I politely side-step platform-preference questions now, because of the assumptions and image people place on me when they learn I'm a mac user are just so goddamn tiresome.
The network transparency of KDE is brilliant. I'm not sure where the holdup for OSX is, but I would kill to be able to open a location with cmd-k, fish://user@myhost
This also works for WebDAV (apple has been a pioneer in the use of WebDAV), SMB (windows fileshares), ssh+scp, etc. yes, you can open an ssh session from Connect to Server in the finder.
Windows has also had similar capabilities for quite a while. I really fail to see what's new and exciting about KDE, save that it supports more tutti-fruity URI's.
Methinks the KDE boys just don't know OSX, because it took me 10 seconds to find this info via google, and I know I've found it on info.apple.com before. Really, folks- both OS X help and info.apple.com are excellent for learning about the OS.
FTTP (Fiber To the Premises)! $39.95 for 5MB/2MB, $49.95 for 15MB/2MB, and $199.95 for 30MB/5MB
...and I live less than 20 minutes out from Boston and I still can't get DSL service other than 1.5mbit/96kbit (yes, you read that right. 96kbit upload, WORSE THAN ISDN!)
If I lived one town over, I could have my choice of DSL providers and about 10 different combos of up/down rates. It's quite sad; Verizon won't allow any of the DSL companies to sell service in our town, and they won't offer anything except their stupid 1.5mbit/96kbit service...probably because they have a gentleman's agreement with AT&T Broadband...which just so happens to be the only choice in cable/cablemodem service. They offer 3mbit/384kbit , but I have never seen better than 200kbit upload over the last 2 years or so; I'm pretty sure they've throttled it way, way back...and despite trying all sorts of traffic shaping, download speeds drop quite a bit when upload speeds go up.
I'm sorry, what's that you were saying about deregulation, Mr. Powell?
I'm not familiar with what "VRLA" means, but unless the battery is sealed gel-type and rated for deep discharge and repeated cycling, I'd wouldn't use it.
VRLA is Valve Regulated Lead Acid...VRLA is better than a sealed lead acid precisely because it will NOT explode- it will vent if charged too fast.
VRLA is a teensy bit different from a standard gel cell in terms of charge profile, but they're close enough that it shouldn't matter much; I think the float voltage is typically lower. HOWEVER, you DO need to make sure you match specifications ( and not just "12v", get the specs sheet and look at the charge, float, etc voltages), and be aware that VRLAs are not particularly fond of heat; adding a tiny fan to the UPS enclosure would probably be a swell idea anyway as the buggers tend to run hot.
The REALLY thorough will check the charge current from the UPS. UPS makers are under pressure to get the battery charged back up quickly, and they may push the limits of the battery's charge current. It's generally C/20 where C = A/Hr capacity; ie a 20Ahr battery should not be charged faster than 1A continuous (a brief peak charge might be OK, and if so, will be specified in current and duration). Charging too fast will cause gassing, overheating- and past a certain point, like many other batteries, lead acid batteries of any type can go into thermal runaway, which is not pretty.
Adding in extra batteries into a UPS not designed for expansion will be trouble, on the charging side of the equation. If you've ever had a completely dead car battery and tried to charge it with a charger, you know what I'm talking about- the voltage drop is so great, the battery practically acts like a short and will cause the charger to overload. The same thing could happen with a UPS. A good sign is if there are battery expansion packs available for your UPS; use that as a guide for sizing.
Oh, and by the way, you may want to consider adjusting your UPS to use the proper float voltage (not for the faint of heart, but possible on some UPS's without soldering), and again, installing a low-speed fan to move some air through the thing and keep everything cool. Many UPS vendors coughAPCcough set their float voltages too high and thus cook the batteries, and the elevated temperatures don't help either; that all makes for a nice revenue stream, as they charge a fortune for replacement packs(which are almost always made up of standard-size batteries, and thus available much more cheaply if you're the enterprising type). Properly maintained lead-acid batteries should last almost a decade- yet most UPS batteries die within a matter of 2-3 years. It's pathetic, considering how much lead is in them and how most people probably don't dispose of the UPS's or the batteries properly.
And they'll be clobbered by the scumbags who undercut them on price by sh!tting on the rest of the world for a buck.
No, because IBM, Dell, and HP will all just use convoluted supply and manufacturing chains, and guard their supplier's identities as best they can.
Why? Obfuscation and "plausible deniability". Every time a human rights organization actually manages to figure out what sweatshop is actually making (insert major fashion label here), the label acts all shocked, says "Gosh, we had NO idea, we have POLICIES to PREVENT this sort of thing, we TOLD them we didn't want them to use sweatshop labor, heads will ROLL!" So they simply find another company, in secret of course, and the whole thing repeats all over again.
We need human rights laws, both nationally and on an international level- backed up by hard monetary sanctions scaled so that they make it completely unprofitable, not just a slap on the wrist. The world court should be able to command banks of UN member nations to seize the assets of the company involved so they can't hide behind foreign incorporation (and most major US companies now do- they're incorporated out of a PO box in the islands- also handy for getting out of taxes, and they do that too; current corporate share of tax burden is about 2%; in 1950 it was 50%).
This happens with every single game that comes out. Why all of a sudden is this huge news?
Probably because marketing people have figured out that only big games are news when they're pirated, so now they try and make sure everyone knows when their game is pirated, because then people will think "oh, it must be big if it was pirated before it's even on the shelves! There must be a lot of demand, it must be an awesome game!"
Honestly, it wouldn't surprise me if the software companies made it quite easy for a pristine copy to make its way into the hands of someone who will post it all over the place, simply for the press and to get word of mouth going by having people play it and ramp up the hype about it.
If the backup program looks up a file's MD5 in its catalog and finds it already there, no need to back up again.
Retrospect does this- and has since the dawn of time, practically. It makes it possible to, in fact, back up about 100 machines in a corporate environment using about 25-50GB of disk space, assuming you exclude everyone's mp3s and whatnot.
You left out one major item. Economic espionage, which is why the EU investigated the program in the first place.
A lot of european contractors kept finding themselves underbid or business stolen from them- when everything was secret and there was no explanation except eavesdropping. Further, it was only US businesses that seemed to benefit from this mysterious information-providing god.
Then I guess he should have said "do these players work with the iTunes music store?", not "do these players work with iTunes?"
So many people think iTunes is JUST a way to use the store, and are amazed when I tell them yes, you can rip your CDs to MP3, or manage the mp3s you've, ahm, 'acquired'...
Actually, a number of players work just fine with iTunes; they appear just like an iPod would, you get the same sync options, etc. Before I bought an iPod, I used it with my Rio500 until I got tired of trying to assemble mp3's on the rio's limited space (even wit a 32MB expansion card, whoa, a whole 32MB!). Straight from an Apple press release in 2001:
download songs to popular MP3 players from Rio and Creative Labs with plug-and-play simplicity with no extra software or complicated driver installations required.
"In the US, Apple's iPod retains 65% market share of digital music players and over 90% market share of players based on a hard drive."
Shucks. 90% of the hard drive player market, and more than half of the market overall.
The Apple Product Cycle (I wish I came up with it, I didn't), which I've linked to in my sig for a month or two because it's hysterical- talks about this "stage" of the game.
Isn't it funny how people have been proclaiming the death of the iPod for...uh...years? iPod is on its FOURTH generation.
But the really big counterfitter, the one that's printing millions of dollars every month doesn't use HP's Laserjet. Come on guys, do you really think they're printing currency in a small time printer?
The 9000 is the largest printer HP makes. It is very, very fast. Probably not as fast as some of the Xerox docucenters and such, but fast.
The problem is that people are stupid and don't actually examine cash they take. It used to be that cashiers could tell instantly if you handed them a fake bill, on feel alone. it's not like the US Mint and Secret Service haven't make efforts to tell people how to ID real currency...
[link to obviously non-reliable "news" source site snipped]
Has anyone actually seen evidence of the mystery earpiece? How about running a frequency scanner near one of his speeches? With a really directional antenna, you should be able to pick up on the heterodyne feedback.
Unless they've got spread-spectrum stuff packed into something that small, which would be pretty impressive.
Heh, an electric Italian car. Where to begin...do you need to remove the passenger seat to charge it?
Well, on the bright side, at least it wasn't made by Lucas. If it had been, the wifi unit would only work if the handbrake light was blown and the left turn signal was on.
Willow Designs. Hands down. The cases are actually padded(gasp! Shock! Amaze!) and very intelligently designed. They also offer(ed) different sizes. For the 17" powerbook, for example, they offered something like 5 different 'sizes' of cases, ranging from a simple padded slipcase to a zillion-compartment case. You get exactly what you need to store your stuff, nothing more, nothing less.
Unfortunately, they're on the way out the door business-wise, because they can't compete price-wise with the shit cranked out by the chinese companies for Targus and the like.
I have the Vermillion case, which is designed specifically the 17" powerbook. It holds the powerbook portrait-style so you don't take people out when you turn around on the subway- important when the thing is a few inches shy of two feet wide. The powerbook fits into the padded sleeve like a glove, very tight and secure, and all sides AND the top and bottom are padded, with a semi-hard shell outside of the padding; the shell is then covered with that super tough fabric stuff, which I treated with Scotchguard to help repel water+dirt. Thin strip of reflective tape on each side. Riveted feet into the bottom keeps it off wet pavement/subway floors. The strap is well padded as is the handle (unlike the common hard rubber handle on most bags, or worse, the soft foam handles that last 2 weeks). It has an expanding compartment on the back that will hold a thick book or two (or in my case, headphones.) The front pocket has divided compartments which are stretchy spandex-like, and hold whatever's put in them- even if you turn the bag upside down while open.
It cost around $80, and it's the best money I've ever spent on an accessory. I've seen countless laptops damaged in "laptop bags" that came with the laptop- they just do NOT protect the laptop in the slightest.
Like most of the chinese-made laptop bags, Eagle Creek uses cheap shit pot metal parts.
The strap buckle on my Eagle Creek saddle-bag lasted about 3 weeks of toting between my car and the office and my apartment. That is, quite frankly, pathetic. It's a good thing I was loosly holding the handle, or the powerbook would have been smashed to bits.
No, not O'reilly. Tom Reilly, the MA Attorney General.
He's been on a virtual warpath against corporations. He didn't back off like all the other states did in the case against Microsoft. He took on the Catholic Church, and sent them running for cover. He's been a non-stop machine against corporate greed and corruption, and it's about damn time. We need a lot more state AG's like him.
I have a feeling he has aspirations for being federal attorney general. Long as he keeps up his current record of corporate ball-busting, I'm all for it. Yet another reason to vote for Kerry, I see it- Bush is quite happy with Ashcroft, and I doubt Ashcroft would last very long under Kerry. Somehow, I don't see Ridge lasting long either.
Pretty sad when you loose an election to a dead person and get slotted right into a high ranking, federal executive position you're not even remotely qualified for.
It also serves as a good reminder to consider using encrypted discs for servers where the data should not fall into the hands of law-enforcement.
Encrypted disks just makes the disk by itself useless. Next time, law enforcement will just take the whole machine.
The only thing encrypted disks get you on a public webserver is protecting those who access your site, but honestly, all that info is easily accessible with a ethernet tap and sniffer, or automatically via the fancier managed switches- and if you are concerned about protecting the privacy of your users, don't log their IPs in the first place.
Sure, but we have no evidence of that whatsover. That only exists in your imagination to justify the harsh treatment of this guy. Please stick to the facts and not what you imagine to be the case.
My comment was strictly addressing the original poster, who said "zOMG he's being PERSECUTED!" My point, and I stick to it, is precisely that we DON'T know the facts.
I also stand by my scenarios- all of them are realistic.
Slashdot Mirror
can but recognize it properly grammars?
(right after I previewed this, Timothy apparently caught it, but the title read "Nokia Smart Phone Recognize Handwriting").
Bleh. When will Toast come out of the dark ages and support even half of the advanced features that burners can do these days?
Image-on-media? Kinda dumb, but no, can't do it. Media compatibility check? Nope. Report on confidence of burn success? Nope. Accurate time estimation? Nope. Statistics on disk readability? Phbt, dream on.
I will say this- Toast used to be the best burning program around, PC or Mac. Now, it's quite clearly been eclipsed. In fact, nothing on the Macintosh platform comes close in terms of support for advanced features on todays' drives.
Make that three- they (and many other advertisers and other sites) needlessly set cookie expiration dates to 2040 and whatnot; I wouldn't mind it so much if they didn't collect like a plague; every few weeks I go through my cookie list and there are literally thousands of cookies from a hundred different advertisers all set to expire in a zillion years. It's absurd, and clearly they don't get it- these cookies should have an expiration of maybe one year at the absolute most. A month or so should be fine in most cases.
I think someone should write a plugin for the various free browsers that punishes bad cookie lifetime params- maybe it inversely sets the actual expiration date in an inverse fashion if the requested date is too far off. For example, over a year, start actually going back down for each year they add. So a cookie marked good until 2040 will actually be good for about a few hours- or less.
Users will bitch, site developers will be forced to look at why it's happening, and the answer from the internet community will be "set more reasonable cookie expiration dates and it won't happen". They'll be in the uncomfortable position of trying to explain why they need such long dates.
Either that or simply allow the user to set a maximum cookie retention time. What I'd REALLY like is a browser that doesn't save cookies for sites I haven't bookmarked, or combine the ideas- cookies for sites not bookmarked aren't saved very long.
I'll give someone $5 if they can do this with a VW beetle radiator :P
I'll give them $20 if they manage to do it with a VW beetle.
As a mac user, btw, I'd like to say that there are so many stereotypes that are simply not true about many Mac users.
I'm constantly amazed by how many stereotypes there are of Macintosh users, and it's actually quite offensive sometimes. "Oh, you're a MAC GUY, I see....our PCs aren't GOOD ENOUGH for you" is what invariably follows. Most of the time, I politely side-step platform-preference questions now, because of the assumptions and image people place on me when they learn I'm a mac user are just so goddamn tiresome.
The network transparency of KDE is brilliant. I'm not sure where the holdup for OSX is, but I would kill to be able to open a location with cmd-k, fish://user@myhost
afp://user:password@hostname_or_atalk_name/direc tory/
This also works for WebDAV (apple has been a pioneer in the use of WebDAV), SMB (windows fileshares), ssh+scp, etc. yes, you can open an ssh session from Connect to Server in the finder.
Windows has also had similar capabilities for quite a while. I really fail to see what's new and exciting about KDE, save that it supports more tutti-fruity URI's.
Methinks the KDE boys just don't know OSX, because it took me 10 seconds to find this info via google, and I know I've found it on info.apple.com before. Really, folks- both OS X help and info.apple.com are excellent for learning about the OS.
FTTP (Fiber To the Premises)! $39.95 for 5MB/2MB, $49.95 for 15MB/2MB, and $199.95 for 30MB/5MB
...and I live less than 20 minutes out from Boston and I still can't get DSL service other than 1.5mbit/96kbit (yes, you read that right. 96kbit upload, WORSE THAN ISDN!)
If I lived one town over, I could have my choice of DSL providers and about 10 different combos of up/down rates. It's quite sad; Verizon won't allow any of the DSL companies to sell service in our town, and they won't offer anything except their stupid 1.5mbit/96kbit service...probably because they have a gentleman's agreement with AT&T Broadband...which just so happens to be the only choice in cable/cablemodem service. They offer 3mbit/384kbit , but I have never seen better than 200kbit upload over the last 2 years or so; I'm pretty sure they've throttled it way, way back...and despite trying all sorts of traffic shaping, download speeds drop quite a bit when upload speeds go up.
I'm sorry, what's that you were saying about deregulation, Mr. Powell?
VRLA is Valve Regulated Lead Acid...VRLA is better than a sealed lead acid precisely because it will NOT explode- it will vent if charged too fast.
VRLA is a teensy bit different from a standard gel cell in terms of charge profile, but they're close enough that it shouldn't matter much; I think the float voltage is typically lower. HOWEVER, you DO need to make sure you match specifications ( and not just "12v", get the specs sheet and look at the charge, float, etc voltages), and be aware that VRLAs are not particularly fond of heat; adding a tiny fan to the UPS enclosure would probably be a swell idea anyway as the buggers tend to run hot.
The REALLY thorough will check the charge current from the UPS. UPS makers are under pressure to get the battery charged back up quickly, and they may push the limits of the battery's charge current. It's generally C/20 where C = A/Hr capacity; ie a 20Ahr battery should not be charged faster than 1A continuous (a brief peak charge might be OK, and if so, will be specified in current and duration). Charging too fast will cause gassing, overheating- and past a certain point, like many other batteries, lead acid batteries of any type can go into thermal runaway, which is not pretty.
Adding in extra batteries into a UPS not designed for expansion will be trouble, on the charging side of the equation. If you've ever had a completely dead car battery and tried to charge it with a charger, you know what I'm talking about- the voltage drop is so great, the battery practically acts like a short and will cause the charger to overload. The same thing could happen with a UPS. A good sign is if there are battery expansion packs available for your UPS; use that as a guide for sizing.
Oh, and by the way, you may want to consider adjusting your UPS to use the proper float voltage (not for the faint of heart, but possible on some UPS's without soldering), and again, installing a low-speed fan to move some air through the thing and keep everything cool. Many UPS vendors coughAPCcough set their float voltages too high and thus cook the batteries, and the elevated temperatures don't help either; that all makes for a nice revenue stream, as they charge a fortune for replacement packs(which are almost always made up of standard-size batteries, and thus available much more cheaply if you're the enterprising type). Properly maintained lead-acid batteries should last almost a decade- yet most UPS batteries die within a matter of 2-3 years. It's pathetic, considering how much lead is in them and how most people probably don't dispose of the UPS's or the batteries properly.
No, because IBM, Dell, and HP will all just use convoluted supply and manufacturing chains, and guard their supplier's identities as best they can.
Why? Obfuscation and "plausible deniability". Every time a human rights organization actually manages to figure out what sweatshop is actually making (insert major fashion label here), the label acts all shocked, says "Gosh, we had NO idea, we have POLICIES to PREVENT this sort of thing, we TOLD them we didn't want them to use sweatshop labor, heads will ROLL!" So they simply find another company, in secret of course, and the whole thing repeats all over again.
We need human rights laws, both nationally and on an international level- backed up by hard monetary sanctions scaled so that they make it completely unprofitable, not just a slap on the wrist. The world court should be able to command banks of UN member nations to seize the assets of the company involved so they can't hide behind foreign incorporation (and most major US companies now do- they're incorporated out of a PO box in the islands- also handy for getting out of taxes, and they do that too; current corporate share of tax burden is about 2%; in 1950 it was 50%).
Yes, that actually was initiated by the Mayor of New York, La Guardia, when he first took office.
Only took twenty years since the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire for someone to do something about it. Wonderful, mmm?
Probably because marketing people have figured out that only big games are news when they're pirated, so now they try and make sure everyone knows when their game is pirated, because then people will think "oh, it must be big if it was pirated before it's even on the shelves! There must be a lot of demand, it must be an awesome game!"
Honestly, it wouldn't surprise me if the software companies made it quite easy for a pristine copy to make its way into the hands of someone who will post it all over the place, simply for the press and to get word of mouth going by having people play it and ramp up the hype about it.
Retrospect does this- and has since the dawn of time, practically. It makes it possible to, in fact, back up about 100 machines in a corporate environment using about 25-50GB of disk space, assuming you exclude everyone's mp3s and whatnot.
You left out one major item. Economic espionage, which is why the EU investigated the program in the first place.
A lot of european contractors kept finding themselves underbid or business stolen from them- when everything was secret and there was no explanation except eavesdropping. Further, it was only US businesses that seemed to benefit from this mysterious information-providing god.
Then I guess he should have said "do these players work with the iTunes music store?", not "do these players work with iTunes?"
So many people think iTunes is JUST a way to use the store, and are amazed when I tell them yes, you can rip your CDs to MP3, or manage the mp3s you've, ahm, 'acquired'...
Actually, a number of players work just fine with iTunes; they appear just like an iPod would, you get the same sync options, etc. Before I bought an iPod, I used it with my Rio500 until I got tired of trying to assemble mp3's on the rio's limited space (even wit a 32MB expansion card, whoa, a whole 32MB!). Straight from an Apple press release in 2001:
download songs to popular MP3 players from Rio and Creative Labs with plug-and-play simplicity with no extra software or complicated driver installations required.
From the recent Apple conference call:
"In the US, Apple's iPod retains 65% market share of digital music players and over 90% market share of players based on a hard drive."
Shucks. 90% of the hard drive player market, and more than half of the market overall.
The Apple Product Cycle (I wish I came up with it, I didn't), which I've linked to in my sig for a month or two because it's hysterical- talks about this "stage" of the game.
Isn't it funny how people have been proclaiming the death of the iPod for...uh...years? iPod is on its FOURTH generation.
Nice bit of free advertising there.
No wonder they can charge $2500-$3500 for laptops that cost around $1500 in Japan.
$1000 is a pretty sweet profit margin for "install a US keyboard".
The 9000 is the largest printer HP makes. It is very, very fast. Probably not as fast as some of the Xerox docucenters and such, but fast.
The problem is that people are stupid and don't actually examine cash they take. It used to be that cashiers could tell instantly if you handed them a fake bill, on feel alone. it's not like the US Mint and Secret Service haven't make efforts to tell people how to ID real currency...
[link to obviously non-reliable "news" source site snipped]
Has anyone actually seen evidence of the mystery earpiece? How about running a frequency scanner near one of his speeches? With a really directional antenna, you should be able to pick up on the heterodyne feedback.
Unless they've got spread-spectrum stuff packed into something that small, which would be pretty impressive.
Heh, an electric Italian car. Where to begin...do you need to remove the passenger seat to charge it?
Well, on the bright side, at least it wasn't made by Lucas. If it had been, the wifi unit would only work if the handbrake light was blown and the left turn signal was on.
But, dear god, don't pull the handbrake!
Willow Designs. Hands down. The cases are actually padded(gasp! Shock! Amaze!) and very intelligently designed. They also offer(ed) different sizes. For the 17" powerbook, for example, they offered something like 5 different 'sizes' of cases, ranging from a simple padded slipcase to a zillion-compartment case. You get exactly what you need to store your stuff, nothing more, nothing less.
Unfortunately, they're on the way out the door business-wise, because they can't compete price-wise with the shit cranked out by the chinese companies for Targus and the like.
I have the Vermillion case, which is designed specifically the 17" powerbook. It holds the powerbook portrait-style so you don't take people out when you turn around on the subway- important when the thing is a few inches shy of two feet wide. The powerbook fits into the padded sleeve like a glove, very tight and secure, and all sides AND the top and bottom are padded, with a semi-hard shell outside of the padding; the shell is then covered with that super tough fabric stuff, which I treated with Scotchguard to help repel water+dirt. Thin strip of reflective tape on each side. Riveted feet into the bottom keeps it off wet pavement/subway floors. The strap is well padded as is the handle (unlike the common hard rubber handle on most bags, or worse, the soft foam handles that last 2 weeks). It has an expanding compartment on the back that will hold a thick book or two (or in my case, headphones.) The front pocket has divided compartments which are stretchy spandex-like, and hold whatever's put in them- even if you turn the bag upside down while open.
It cost around $80, and it's the best money I've ever spent on an accessory. I've seen countless laptops damaged in "laptop bags" that came with the laptop- they just do NOT protect the laptop in the slightest.
The strap buckle on my Eagle Creek saddle-bag lasted about 3 weeks of toting between my car and the office and my apartment. That is, quite frankly, pathetic. It's a good thing I was loosly holding the handle, or the powerbook would have been smashed to bits.
No, not O'reilly. Tom Reilly, the MA Attorney General.
He's been on a virtual warpath against corporations. He didn't back off like all the other states did in the case against Microsoft. He took on the Catholic Church, and sent them running for cover. He's been a non-stop machine against corporate greed and corruption, and it's about damn time. We need a lot more state AG's like him.
I have a feeling he has aspirations for being federal attorney general. Long as he keeps up his current record of corporate ball-busting, I'm all for it. Yet another reason to vote for Kerry, I see it- Bush is quite happy with Ashcroft, and I doubt Ashcroft would last very long under Kerry. Somehow, I don't see Ridge lasting long either.
Pretty sad when you loose an election to a dead person and get slotted right into a high ranking, federal executive position you're not even remotely qualified for.
Encrypted disks just makes the disk by itself useless. Next time, law enforcement will just take the whole machine.
The only thing encrypted disks get you on a public webserver is protecting those who access your site, but honestly, all that info is easily accessible with a ethernet tap and sniffer, or automatically via the fancier managed switches- and if you are concerned about protecting the privacy of your users, don't log their IPs in the first place.
My comment was strictly addressing the original poster, who said "zOMG he's being PERSECUTED!" My point, and I stick to it, is precisely that we DON'T know the facts.
I also stand by my scenarios- all of them are realistic.