I have an IBM X40, and a year ago I had a bicycle accident, being thrown off the bike at 20mph on to a concrete path. I landed smack on top of the X40, which was just sitting in a unpadded courier bag. Damage to laptop: Scratched corner. Damage to me: Sprained knee, fractured elbow.
It's a tough laptop.
The extended battery really does give it a 7 to 9 hour life, too.
The previous record was 235mph (378km/h), set by the Thermo King Streamliner in 1973, which the Dieselmax broke by 115mph. I don't know anything about the Mercedes car, but early last week the Dieselmax was having difficulty bringing the rear engine online and did actually end up doing a 226mph (360km/h) run on just the one engine.:)
What's trying to be said on the site is that the car didn't undergo any physical testing or prototypes before the metal was cut for the production car. The mechanical parts were tested with Finite Element Analysis and, more notably, the Aerodynamics entirely with Computational Fluid Dynamics. Although most cars are designed entirely on computers these days (The Deiselmax on Unigraphics, incidentally), they'll invariably make a model of the car and test it in a physical wind tunnel. This is true of even ultra-high-end development like F1 - the Toyota team has three Wind Tunnels that run 24/7/365 when they're not down for maintainance.
This wasn't an option for the Dieselmax for two reasons. The first was the speed involved - most automotive wind tunnels with the 'rolling road' surface required for accurate results top out around 240mph, way short of 375mph. The second, much more important factor is size - this car is nine meters long! Normally high-speed road car models are tested at between 1/3rd and 1/6th scale, and to fit the Dieselmax onto a rolling road tunnel would require a very small model, and the results you got from it would be very nearly useless.
I currently own an X40 and I'd have to say it's the best laptop I've ever used - superb keyboard, light weight and battery life combined with the legendary IBM build quality. The 1.8" hard drive isn't the fastest out there (actually, I'd be suprised if there were any slower) but I'd say that's an acceptable compromise given the pros. I love the tablet concept so we'll see how long I'll be able to resist the X41T. My provisional justifcations include "But think how much tider my desk will look without all those notepads!" and "Think of the environmental benefits!"
That's not a review, it's a summary of the press release and it's two weeks old. I'm used to commenters not RTFA, but it's getting a bit much when the posters can't be bothered either.
You can find the only real review of the X41 Tablet I'm aware of here:
I like the convenience of pop-out transmitter and the comfort-factor of the expanding design, but the scroll panel is annoying. As radish says, you can't middle click in firefox, so I've ended up with one hand on the buttons on my Thinkpad for clicking and the other hand on the mouse for cursor movement.
The other annoying thing about the scroll panel is that you have to be very careful about where you rest your finger. I've found that as I'm reading, my finger starts to relax and all of a sudden, I'm looking at the top of the page again.
The final point of irritation is the position of the optical sensor, which is right at the front of the mouse. I understand that they had to put it there because there isn't anywhere else for it, but it does give a very strange cursor response.
I wonder what kind of liquid metal they're using that is "completely non-toxic." Could it really be metal particles suspended in oil, like some kind of very dilute thermal paste?
The only other application of liquid metal cooling I know of is the reactors on Soviet Alfa-Class Submarines, which used a molten lead-bismuth alloy. It allowed them to make small, high-power reactors, but unfortunately, despite attempts by the Soviets to keep the coolent molten with external superheated steam feeds, they had to keep the reactors running 24/7 or the coolent would fall below 125 degrees centigrade, freeze solid and render the reactor useless.
With digicams heading towards 14 megapixels, I can see the need for faster data storage (ever waited for a 60mb RAW file to save to a CF card?), and introducing something that combines backwards compatibilty with SD/MMC cards and native USB2.0 support (No more card readers, just an adaptor cable, or possibly even a set of built-in contacts like the new SD/USB cards.) seems like a suspiciously common-sense approach.
Bulldog Broadband tried an 8mb service in the UK for about six months, but dropped it because of poor takeup. I can't see this product doing any better since, like Bulldog's, it's only available in Central London where the population density makes it economical enough to cover British Telecom's exorbitant local exchange access fees. Even if you do live in London, you have to live within 2000 yards of an exchange to get 8mbps.
Although they say they have plans to expand this to other cities in the UK, I really don't see it happening.
ATA/100 means that the interface has a top speed of 100MBps and it was the last official ATA standard before Serial-ATA. ATA/133 was just something Maxtor cooked up as a marketing ploy.
Internal capacity isn't the upgrade you should be looking for on the Mac Mini. Since it uses a 2.5" Notebook HD you're pretty much limited to 100GB, which is a pretty expensive upgrade for gaining 20GB of space. My plan is to dump the 4,200rpm or 5,400rpm drive in the mini and replace it with one of the new 2.5" 7,200rpm drives. If I need more external storage, I'll just buy a Firewire HD.
A) I am making this post from a TiBook running Debian. Debian has one of the best PPC ports out there. I think the Mini will most likely run Debian very nicely.
So I guess your mom will be buying one, then?
Everyone is sick of the stupid clock speed per dollar argument. It's lame. Quit assuming that everyone out there cares about raw CPU power first and foremost, or shut up.
I wasn't saying that it was important. I was saying that people can go on and on about it and it isn't going to make the slightest bit of difference to 99% of the purchasing descisions made about the MM.
This comparison is flawed, largely because MiG-29 isn't the counterpart to the F-15. The F-15 was designed as a high altitude, no-limits bomber/fighter interceptor ('not a pound for air-to-ground') that would engage it's targets with long-range missiles. The MiG-29 is a fighter-bomber designed for operating over the front lines, supporting the Soviet advance - it's direct counterpart in the US inventory would be the F-16.
The Soviet counterpart to the F-15 would be the Su-27, which is arguably superior in terms of dogfighting capabilities (better aerodyamics and short-range heat-seeking missiles) but loses out dramaticaly at beyond-visual-range combat (inferior radar and radar-guided missiles).
The F/A-18 has it's roots in the YF-17 that lost the USAF's light weight fighter competition to the F-16. Requiring an aircraft to replace the F-8 and A-7, the US Navy purchased a version of the YF-17 with a heavier internal stucture and landing gear as a fighter-bomber. Unfortunately, the resulting aircraft has always been poorly regarded by the naval aviation community because of it's limited range ('Just enough fuel to take off, circle the carrier once, and then land') and inability to carry a significant warload.
From the perspective of the MiG-29 pilot, the F/A-18 would be a worrying opponent because of it's AMRAAM missiles, but in a close-in dogfight, the F/A-18 would be serious trouble.
Just to try and head off some of the sillier comments here:
As anyone working in a Vet's Surgery will tell you, these sub-dermal chips have a read range of about 2-3 inches, so you don't have to worry about the club recording how many times you gave ten euros to the guy in the corner with all the funny bulges in his hat.
Sorry.
We will now return you to your normal paranoid service.
I have an 80GB Snap Server at work, and I dislike the thing throughly. It only picks up a random 80% sampling of our Active Directory users every time it's rebooted, which means we have to run it with no file security. Snap's helpdesk claimed this problem would be fixed by installing the new "Snap OS 4", which at the bargin price of $100 offered "Complete Windows 2003 Server ADS compatibility!" But, I protested, we were only running Windows 2000, and it says Windows 2000 compatibility on the box...
After much cajoling, the helpdesk admitted that wasn't strictly true, but Snap OS 4 would make it so, and add a glorious weath of new features into the bargin. So we sighed, and bought it.
Needless to say, it's now picking up about 70% of our Active Directory.
The moral of the story is: Don't buy hardware from companies that charge $100 to patch something that should have worked from the get-go.
Based on your assertion that you previously ran nearly everything on a single linux server - implying a fairly small company - I'd just like to make a few observations that point to you having made the whole story up.
Primary and Secondary Servers: There is no such thing as Primary and Secondary Active Directory servers in a domain. There are just ADS servers, which hold the distributed ADS database, and member servers, which don't. Master/Slave or Primary/Secondary was NT 4.0.
DNS is integral to Active Directory. You don't have a seperate DNS server.
You could easily have made the Exchange server an ADS server in case of failure on the primary - or, considering you imply you were running everything on one linux server, just run Exchange on a machine that's also the domain controller.
Why exactly would you replace your Linux webserver with an IIS server anyway? Outlook Web Access runs just fine on the Exchange server without that much overhead. Even if it was an issue, you could have installed ChilliASP or suchlike on your Linux Webserver and mounted the OWA directory using Samba.
A whole server for Anti-Virus? What have you been smoking? Assuming you have anti-virus at every desktop, all you need to do is scan e-mails on the way into the company, so just use a linux machine running open-source AV to forward external mail to the exchange server.
You have to balance the time savings the company made by using the Outlook Groupware functions against the cost of any additional machines or software. This is why the actual difference to the bottom line of a company that Open Source makes is so negligible.
1 Exchange Server + 2 ADS Servers + 1 IIS Server + 1 AV Server is five Windows Servers, not six. If you can't do basic Maths, I'm not suprised your boss over-ruled you. If it was true, I agree with you: You should have stuck with Linux, because you clearly know nothing about Windows Servers.
The days of going to your friendly local are over, and now the store assistants don't even need to think or recognise, they simply wrap digital information in comforting words and give you a nice smile.
The important point is: If you can't tell the difference between the two, why does it matter?
Unfortunately, if you wanted this to work, you'd need to overcome the range issues by either using the serious industrial pallet-tracking 9-volt battery powered RFID tags, or having a detector in every cubic foot of your house.
People seem to have got it in their heads that these tiny grain-of-rice sized RFID tags will let CIA satellites track your every movement and interaction via your underpants, which is just crazy.
The detection range of an RFID tag that you can comfortably include in an item of clothing is about 20-30cms, depending on the model and the size of the antenna. For the ones that are enclosed completely in glass capsules, it can be as little as 10cm - and if retailers want cheaper tags, this range is going to go down.
Since the range that a passive RFID tag can be read at is proportional to the amount of power that the reader puts out, anyone who wanted to read one of those tiny tags from 100m away would have to fire so much microwave radiation at you that you'd be too busy bursting into flames to care about the invasion of privacy. All an RFID tag really does is identify an item of clothing that you buy, not you. That item of clothing could be given as a gift, shared between partners or sold in a thrift store - the information you can get from tracking it is so abstract in it's focus and massive in it's volume as to be nearly useless.
Besides, stores already have a way of tracking you. They're called 'Credit Cards'.
Slashdot Mirror
I have an IBM X40, and a year ago I had a bicycle accident, being thrown off the bike at 20mph on to a concrete path. I landed smack on top of the X40, which was just sitting in a unpadded courier bag. Damage to laptop: Scratched corner. Damage to me: Sprained knee, fractured elbow.
It's a tough laptop.
The extended battery really does give it a 7 to 9 hour life, too.
The previous record was 235mph (378km/h), set by the Thermo King Streamliner in 1973, which the Dieselmax broke by 115mph. I don't know anything about the Mercedes car, but early last week the Dieselmax was having difficulty bringing the rear engine online and did actually end up doing a 226mph (360km/h) run on just the one engine. :)
What's trying to be said on the site is that the car didn't undergo any physical testing or prototypes before the metal was cut for the production car. The mechanical parts were tested with Finite Element Analysis and, more notably, the Aerodynamics entirely with Computational Fluid Dynamics. Although most cars are designed entirely on computers these days (The Deiselmax on Unigraphics, incidentally), they'll invariably make a model of the car and test it in a physical wind tunnel. This is true of even ultra-high-end development like F1 - the Toyota team has three Wind Tunnels that run 24/7/365 when they're not down for maintainance.
This wasn't an option for the Dieselmax for two reasons. The first was the speed involved - most automotive wind tunnels with the 'rolling road' surface required for accurate results top out around 240mph, way short of 375mph. The second, much more important factor is size - this car is nine meters long! Normally high-speed road car models are tested at between 1/3rd and 1/6th scale, and to fit the Dieselmax onto a rolling road tunnel would require a very small model, and the results you got from it would be very nearly useless.
An excellent little 'first look' gallery of pictures:
s ID=264
http://www.tabletpcreviewspot.com/default.asp?new
I currently own an X40 and I'd have to say it's the best laptop I've ever used - superb keyboard, light weight and battery life combined with the legendary IBM build quality. The 1.8" hard drive isn't the fastest out there (actually, I'd be suprised if there were any slower) but I'd say that's an acceptable compromise given the pros. I love the tablet concept so we'll see how long I'll be able to resist the X41T. My provisional justifcations include "But think how much tider my desk will look without all those notepads!" and "Think of the environmental benefits!"
That's not a review, it's a summary of the press release and it's two weeks old. I'm used to commenters not RTFA, but it's getting a bit much when the posters can't be bothered either. You can find the only real review of the X41 Tablet I'm aware of here:
s p
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1823715,00.a
I like the convenience of pop-out transmitter and the comfort-factor of the expanding design, but the scroll panel is annoying. As radish says, you can't middle click in firefox, so I've ended up with one hand on the buttons on my Thinkpad for clicking and the other hand on the mouse for cursor movement.
The other annoying thing about the scroll panel is that you have to be very careful about where you rest your finger. I've found that as I'm reading, my finger starts to relax and all of a sudden, I'm looking at the top of the page again.
The final point of irritation is the position of the optical sensor, which is right at the front of the mouse. I understand that they had to put it there because there isn't anywhere else for it, but it does give a very strange cursor response.
I wonder what kind of liquid metal they're using that is "completely non-toxic." Could it really be metal particles suspended in oil, like some kind of very dilute thermal paste? The only other application of liquid metal cooling I know of is the reactors on Soviet Alfa-Class Submarines, which used a molten lead-bismuth alloy. It allowed them to make small, high-power reactors, but unfortunately, despite attempts by the Soviets to keep the coolent molten with external superheated steam feeds, they had to keep the reactors running 24/7 or the coolent would fall below 125 degrees centigrade, freeze solid and render the reactor useless.
With digicams heading towards 14 megapixels, I can see the need for faster data storage (ever waited for a 60mb RAW file to save to a CF card?), and introducing something that combines backwards compatibilty with SD/MMC cards and native USB2.0 support (No more card readers, just an adaptor cable, or possibly even a set of built-in contacts like the new SD/USB cards.) seems like a suspiciously common-sense approach.
Bulldog Broadband tried an 8mb service in the UK for about six months, but dropped it because of poor takeup. I can't see this product doing any better since, like Bulldog's, it's only available in Central London where the population density makes it economical enough to cover British Telecom's exorbitant local exchange access fees. Even if you do live in London, you have to live within 2000 yards of an exchange to get 8mbps.
Although they say they have plans to expand this to other cities in the UK, I really don't see it happening.
ATA/100 means that the interface has a top speed of 100MBps and it was the last official ATA standard before Serial-ATA. ATA/133 was just something Maxtor cooked up as a marketing ploy.
Internal capacity isn't the upgrade you should be looking for on the Mac Mini. Since it uses a 2.5" Notebook HD you're pretty much limited to 100GB, which is a pretty expensive upgrade for gaining 20GB of space. My plan is to dump the 4,200rpm or 5,400rpm drive in the mini and replace it with one of the new 2.5" 7,200rpm drives. If I need more external storage, I'll just buy a Firewire HD.
A) I am making this post from a TiBook running Debian. Debian has one of the best PPC ports out there. I think the Mini will most likely run Debian very nicely.
So I guess your mom will be buying one, then?
Everyone is sick of the stupid clock speed per dollar argument. It's lame. Quit assuming that everyone out there cares about raw CPU power first and foremost, or shut up.
I wasn't saying that it was important. I was saying that people can go on and on about it and it isn't going to make the slightest bit of difference to 99% of the purchasing descisions made about the MM.
I don't know what site you were looking at, but the Apple Store was certainly out of action for the best part of yesterday.
Lindsey Lohan? Why, man, why?
Baps.
This comparison is flawed, largely because MiG-29 isn't the counterpart to the F-15. The F-15 was designed as a high altitude, no-limits bomber/fighter interceptor ('not a pound for air-to-ground') that would engage it's targets with long-range missiles. The MiG-29 is a fighter-bomber designed for operating over the front lines, supporting the Soviet advance - it's direct counterpart in the US inventory would be the F-16.
The Soviet counterpart to the F-15 would be the Su-27, which is arguably superior in terms of dogfighting capabilities (better aerodyamics and short-range heat-seeking missiles) but loses out dramaticaly at beyond-visual-range combat (inferior radar and radar-guided missiles).
The F/A-18 has it's roots in the YF-17 that lost the USAF's light weight fighter competition to the F-16. Requiring an aircraft to replace the F-8 and A-7, the US Navy purchased a version of the YF-17 with a heavier internal stucture and landing gear as a fighter-bomber. Unfortunately, the resulting aircraft has always been poorly regarded by the naval aviation community because of it's limited range ('Just enough fuel to take off, circle the carrier once, and then land') and inability to carry a significant warload.
From the perspective of the MiG-29 pilot, the F/A-18 would be a worrying opponent because of it's AMRAAM missiles, but in a close-in dogfight, the F/A-18 would be serious trouble.
Freecom have had an external hard drive based on a 1.8" unit for a couple of months now.
Link
Just to try and head off some of the sillier comments here:
As anyone working in a Vet's Surgery will tell you, these sub-dermal chips have a read range of about 2-3 inches, so you don't have to worry about the club recording how many times you gave ten euros to the guy in the corner with all the funny bulges in his hat.
Sorry.
We will now return you to your normal paranoid service.
RFID tags come with a random 128-bit number burnt into them at the factory. Sorry.
I have an 80GB Snap Server at work, and I dislike the thing throughly. It only picks up a random 80% sampling of our Active Directory users every time it's rebooted, which means we have to run it with no file security. Snap's helpdesk claimed this problem would be fixed by installing the new "Snap OS 4", which at the bargin price of $100 offered "Complete Windows 2003 Server ADS compatibility!" But, I protested, we were only running Windows 2000, and it says Windows 2000 compatibility on the box ...
After much cajoling, the helpdesk admitted that wasn't strictly true, but Snap OS 4 would make it so, and add a glorious weath of new features into the bargin. So we sighed, and bought it.
Needless to say, it's now picking up about 70% of our Active Directory.
The moral of the story is: Don't buy hardware from companies that charge $100 to patch something that should have worked from the get-go.
Based on your assertion that you previously ran nearly everything on a single linux server - implying a fairly small company - I'd just like to make a few observations that point to you having made the whole story up.
Primary and Secondary Servers: There is no such thing as Primary and Secondary Active Directory servers in a domain. There are just ADS servers, which hold the distributed ADS database, and member servers, which don't. Master/Slave or Primary/Secondary was NT 4.0.
DNS is integral to Active Directory. You don't have a seperate DNS server.
You could easily have made the Exchange server an ADS server in case of failure on the primary - or, considering you imply you were running everything on one linux server, just run Exchange on a machine that's also the domain controller.
Why exactly would you replace your Linux webserver with an IIS server anyway? Outlook Web Access runs just fine on the Exchange server without that much overhead. Even if it was an issue, you could have installed ChilliASP or suchlike on your Linux Webserver and mounted the OWA directory using Samba.
A whole server for Anti-Virus? What have you been smoking? Assuming you have anti-virus at every desktop, all you need to do is scan e-mails on the way into the company, so just use a linux machine running open-source AV to forward external mail to the exchange server.
You have to balance the time savings the company made by using the Outlook Groupware functions against the cost of any additional machines or software. This is why the actual difference to the bottom line of a company that Open Source makes is so negligible.
1 Exchange Server + 2 ADS Servers + 1 IIS Server + 1 AV Server is five Windows Servers, not six. If you can't do basic Maths, I'm not suprised your boss over-ruled you. If it was true, I agree with you: You should have stuck with Linux, because you clearly know nothing about Windows Servers.
Apart from a powerbook, ibook, ipod, mini ipod, Apple Watch, Apple Pen, Apple laptop bag...
The days of going to your friendly local are over, and now the store assistants don't even need to think or recognise, they simply wrap digital information in comforting words and give you a nice smile. The important point is: If you can't tell the difference between the two, why does it matter?
Unfortunately, if you wanted this to work, you'd need to overcome the range issues by either using the serious industrial pallet-tracking 9-volt battery powered RFID tags, or having a detector in every cubic foot of your house.
People seem to have got it in their heads that these tiny grain-of-rice sized RFID tags will let CIA satellites track your every movement and interaction via your underpants, which is just crazy. The detection range of an RFID tag that you can comfortably include in an item of clothing is about 20-30cms, depending on the model and the size of the antenna. For the ones that are enclosed completely in glass capsules, it can be as little as 10cm - and if retailers want cheaper tags, this range is going to go down.
Since the range that a passive RFID tag can be read at is proportional to the amount of power that the reader puts out, anyone who wanted to read one of those tiny tags from 100m away would have to fire so much microwave radiation at you that you'd be too busy bursting into flames to care about the invasion of privacy. All an RFID tag really does is identify an item of clothing that you buy, not you. That item of clothing could be given as a gift, shared between partners or sold in a thrift store - the information you can get from tracking it is so abstract in it's focus and massive in it's volume as to be nearly useless.
Besides, stores already have a way of tracking you. They're called 'Credit Cards'.