I was the "victim" of a similar recall for the battery of my wife's Fujitsu Siemens notebook earlier this year. These battery recalls happen an awful lot of time lately and I would like to ask: who is the battery manufacturer? I know IBM, Fujitsu Siemens, Acer, etc. don't produce their models themselves but make the design and outsource the production.
I just want to point out that the several parts of a notebook are produced by different vendors, like the video card in my ThinkPad is from ATI, the DVD/CD-RW from Matsushita, and so on. So maybe we shouldn't blame HP here alone, but also the producer of the battery. In any case HP (and in my case Fujitsu Siemens) is responsible for bad QA here.
Tell that to our Minister of the Interior Mr. Otto Schily. Here: http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/politik/0,1518,gros sbild-359857-354486,00.html is quite a nice picture of him with an unmasking gesture. He's the one who wanted to force ISPs to store every website you visited and every e-mail you sent or got for one whole year! Sorry the article the picture belongs to is in German only, but Spiegel Online (SPON) starts to publish articles in English now, too. It's about privacy and ends with the speculation that an attempt to outlaw cryptography in Germany will be made soon. So use babelfish if you're interested...
"Foreshadowing email, they made informal, asynchronous communication with your co-workers a major part of modern office life."
I hate it when I come back from a lunch break and my monitor shines in yellow with gazillions of post-its from co-workers on it! Sometimes I think people just wait until you leave your desk and then attack you with post-its from behind. Office is so cruel sometimes...
Ever tried to install a "pure" Windows XP on a laptop lately? You probably run into the same problems as with a one-size-fits-all Linux distribution.
As I mentioned some time ago, my Thinkpad T40p came with a customized version of SuSE 9.1 pro. This is what I would say is a ready for the laptop linux distribution. You simply put the the disk in your DVD drive, answer 2-3 short questions at the beginning regarding the partitions and amount of space you want to use (or simply go with the defaults), click ok and off you go.
Just like using a recovery Windows XP CD, all hardware modules are installed and configured, plus a whole bunch of usefull applications for e-mail, WWW, office applications.
I had a lot of trouble installing XP from a "normal" installation CD on my old T21, which came with a Windows 98 recovery CD, and which I wanted to upgrade.
Of course, the FC3 installer shouldn't just have displayed a black screen. But this whole question if Linux is ready for the laptop isn't fair if you compare an unmodified Linux distribution with Windows recovery CDs explicitly made for your computer model.
Does anybody have a link about the new features that are coming with IE7? On the one hand, I'm glad that Firefox is gaining market share because variaty is good in this case, on the other hand I hope that IE5 and IE6 users will move at least to IE7. Why? Because I have to maintain a Java Applet for my company and I hope that IE7 comes without a MS Java Plugin, so I finally can get rid of all this Java 1.1 code.
Downloading TV shows (outside US/UK/AUS/...) has another advantage: You get the original and not a stupid dubbed version where they ruin all the jokes with bad translations.
I already asked my TV provider whether the original audio feed will be broadcasted with DVB. The simple answer was no, due to right issues.
So the only chance of watching the original show is to wait until the DVD comes out.
Well, on the backside of my T40p it says "Manufactured for IBM Corporation Armonk, New York, USA. Made in China" already. And this is not a modell I bought at a trip to the future and brought it back to present in a time machine.
The USA is not becoming a third world country, it's more like the former second and third world countries are finally beginning to catch up. And this can only be a good thing for working conditions over there. Isn't that what development aid is for?
And now that these countries start to play on the global market, the "old economies" and its citizens are complaining "their" technology would be sold out. How pathetic!
Stop being lazy, face the changing conditions on the global market, prepare yourself and also look at the great opportunities of it. As a US citizen you should be the last one complaining about knowledge transfer, because 1 out of 2 of your leading engineers and scientists are not of American origin.
On this point you are right. These scientists go to the US because of better working conditions, more money, but health care? I doubt it. Freedoms? The US government has been cutting them for quite a few years and I don't see a change of this trend. But nobody forces you to buy products produced by kids for 5 cents/hour. And nobody stops you showing evidence that this happens.
It can be a good thing seeing western companies investing in the Chinese market or selling divisions to Chinese companies, if the deal includes that the working conditions over there have to meet certain standards.
Really? What about Microsoft GmbH, also seated near Munich and its employees? They don't code for food and they spend their money on goods produced in the Munich area, so the vast majority of the money won't leave the country.
And even if, the guys in Redmond buy Mercedes (Stuttgart), Porsche (Zuffenhausen) and BMW (Munich) anyway with the money they earn so it all comes back.;)
My point is, you can't blame companies for making money, that's what business is about. Free software is about free as in speech, not as in beer. Money is not a valid argument in these discussions.
Actually no, according to an article by the heise lawyer in the recent issue (sorry, no links, I only have the printed version) of German computer magazine c't - it may be different in other countries.
If somebody shares illegal data using your access point whithout your knowledge and the police stops by it's your responsibility to show them that it wasn't you sharing all these warez, kiddie porn and MP3s. So if you plan on making your AP a hotspot, you should really think about how to create detailed log files of all the traffic going through.
I don't know if Linus would pronounce SuSE correctly, but you could listen to the press conference Novell and SuSE held, where I think Richard Seibt (former CEO of SuSE) pronounces SuSE several times:
Strictly defined, spyware is computer software that gathers information about a computer user without the user's knowledge or informed consent, and then transmits this information to an organisation that expects to be able to profit from it in some way.
Ok, this is not spyware - strictly defined and mentioned on the NETI@home webpage in every second sentence.
There are a lot more usefull distributed computing projects out there (folding@home for example), and why is everyone starting such a project? What will the data be used for? "To make the Internet a better place"? Yeah, right, I'm so convinced.
Before I participate in such a project, I would like to have much more information about what results are expected and what the consequences will be. This sounds more like they don't want to do the research by themselves. ISPs refuse to give away their data - they already analyze their networks and would have all the data needed. They surely don't give the data away for free as in beer - it would be better if they wouldn't do so at all.
This sounds like a really shirt-sleeved way to try to improve "The Internet". From a university I would expect a more sophisticated way, say, in improving protocols, arguing about and convincing the industry to switch to IPv6 and so on...
I got my Thinkpad T40p here at http://nofost.de/. This shop is an IBM business partner and has a special program for students.
The laptop came pre-installed with Win XP professional but also with a SuSE 9 pro box and a special IBM SuSE 9 CD to install a dual-boot system, doing all the repartitioning, and so on.
I can't imagine that IBM doesn't sell this special SuSE CD with their Thinkpads in the US, too.
You shouldn't have any trouble with the T41. At least my model works great. IBM (Germany) had a special offer including SuSE Pro 9 (the standard box). Additionally to that I got a special T40/T41 CD that repartitioned the harddrive (15GB Win XP, 45GB Linux;)) and installed SuSE with all necessary modules. It went really great, no trouble at all.
Also check out www.linux-on-laptops.com. Especially for IBM laptops there are lots of pages out there describing linux installations for various distributions in-depth.
Btw: I ordered my T40p with the optional 802.11a/b/g card (standard is a/b) and installed FC1 - not because SuSE is bad, just because I'm used to RH. The card is manufactured by Philips and works just fine with the modules from madwifi (visit SourceForge). Well, with kernel 2.4.*, I still have some trouble with kernel 2.6.*.
In this case it's because the only thing you achieve with this behaviour is to lose. You should not let SCO drag you down to their own low level. They are much more experienced at that level and will beat you.
I think he makes a good point with the statement that a one minute interruption can cost 10 to 15 minutes of productivity. Maybe productivity is the wrong word here because it translates so easily into money these days. Concentration would be much better. I for myself need a room that can be locked, a telephone line that can be unplugged and a quiet and relaxed atmosphere to concentrate on the work I want to do or that I have to do.
Unfortunatly this seems to be impossible in "modern" offices, there's lots of noise (IM and E-Mail is "noise", too!), everybody thinks he just can walk in after knocking at the door without waiting for a "come in" and the phone rings permanently.
It's great that you can reach and can be reached at any time at any place today. But it would be even greater if you could not be reached some time and others would respect that. Everybody who tried to have a phone line "just for emergencies" knows how people abuse it over time...
A quick search on Google ("mplayer qt") leeds to a nice RPM package called mplayer-codecs-win32-qt-6.0-2 RPM for i386. Works just fine. rpmfind.net also lists a lot of mplayer-codecs-* packages. I'm sure there are also Debian packages around.
It's not a public computer, it's a university computer. At least at my university and other universities I know of there are usage restrictions: for study purposes only. And you are not allowed to install tools like you want, you could also be excluded from university when you get caught.
If you think you really need a tool for your student work then you have to go to the computer center, ask for it and let them install it. You are only allowed to install software in your home directory which does not need any modifications of the windows registry and fits into your small home directory (<= 40 - 100 MB usually. Enough for data and coding).
If the workstations (NT, 2000) are adminstrated properly, you are not even able to install software - as somebody mentioned before.
But the real point is: Even if it is considered to be a public computer, you expect it to be clean and usable. This is more of an attitude problem regarding public stuff and public places people seem to have. If people are able to install these tools then they should uninstall it when they leave the computer. It's like taking your empty bottles with you when you go for a picknick - which a lot of people just leave there.
Hmmm, a short lookup in my almanac told me that Croatia has the Kuna as official currency. But a search on Google (http://www.rferl.org/nca/features/2000/11/1411200 0200134.asp) brought up this article which reports that Montenegro adopted the mark but transferred to the Euro in January 2002. This was also the time when the Euro became the official currency in France, Germany and all the other Euro countries.
Only if you write it with an umlaut ö instead of o. This joke is as old as the name I think. The origin of the name 'Vogler' is in the tradition of naming after a profession. A 'Vogler' is a person who catches birds and sells or trains them (falconer) for hunting.
It's waterproof after DIN 8310. Sorry, www.din.de would like to have 23,50 Euros for this norm so I can't get you the link. But DIN 8310 meens: 30 minutes in 1m (3.28 ft) water depth, 90 seconds in 20 meters (65.62 ft).
So, you can wash your hands or take a shower wearing it, but not much more.
No, Austria has the Euro, too. Maybe it's just for the "feeling". Lots of people in the Euro zone still translate into their old currency (like here into German marks). Another interesting thing about the old currencies is that Croatia, for example, still has the German mark as their currency. So this currency is still alive.
The order form also said something about "shipping in the EU zone". Maybe this is the reason why some Americans here in the forum had problems getting their watch? I remember ordering some T-Shirts from a US based company for our linux user group (from thinkgeek) and we had to pay a lot of customs duty and actually drive to the airport to get our package.
It's in this case cheaper and less stressful to have a friend in Europe (or for the other way in the US) who buys the product and sends it to you via snake mail and makes sure he marks it as "GIFT, BELOW $20". Huh, reminds me of the days when the GDR existed and we send chocolate to our cousins in eastern Germany.;)
Slashdot Mirror
I was the "victim" of a similar recall for the battery of my wife's Fujitsu Siemens notebook earlier this year. These battery recalls happen an awful lot of time lately and I would like to ask: who is the battery manufacturer? I know IBM, Fujitsu Siemens, Acer, etc. don't produce their models themselves but make the design and outsource the production.
I just want to point out that the several parts of a notebook are produced by different vendors, like the video card in my ThinkPad is from ATI, the DVD/CD-RW from Matsushita, and so on. So maybe we shouldn't blame HP here alone, but also the producer of the battery. In any case HP (and in my case Fujitsu Siemens) is responsible for bad QA here.
Tell that to our Minister of the Interior Mr. Otto Schily. Here: http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/politik/0,1518,gros sbild-359857-354486,00.html is quite a nice picture of him with an unmasking gesture. He's the one who wanted to force ISPs to store every website you visited and every e-mail you sent or got for one whole year! Sorry the article the picture belongs to is in German only, but Spiegel Online (SPON) starts to publish articles in English now, too. It's about privacy and ends with the speculation that an attempt to outlaw cryptography in Germany will be made soon. So use babelfish if you're interested...
"Foreshadowing email, they made informal, asynchronous communication with your co-workers a major part of modern office life."
I hate it when I come back from a lunch break and my monitor shines in yellow with gazillions of post-its from co-workers on it! Sometimes I think people just wait until you leave your desk and then attack you with post-its from behind. Office is so cruel sometimes...
Ever tried to install a "pure" Windows XP on a laptop lately? You probably run into the same problems as with a one-size-fits-all Linux distribution.
As I mentioned some time ago, my Thinkpad T40p came with a customized version of SuSE 9.1 pro. This is what I would say is a ready for the laptop linux distribution. You simply put the the disk in your DVD drive, answer 2-3 short questions at the beginning regarding the partitions and amount of space you want to use (or simply go with the defaults), click ok and off you go.
Just like using a recovery Windows XP CD, all hardware modules are installed and configured, plus a whole bunch of usefull applications for e-mail, WWW, office applications.
I had a lot of trouble installing XP from a "normal" installation CD on my old T21, which came with a Windows 98 recovery CD, and which I wanted to upgrade.
Of course, the FC3 installer shouldn't just have displayed a black screen. But this whole question if Linux is ready for the laptop isn't fair if you compare an unmodified Linux distribution with Windows recovery CDs explicitly made for your computer model.
Does anybody have a link about the new features that are coming with IE7? On the one hand, I'm glad that Firefox is gaining market share because variaty is good in this case, on the other hand I hope that IE5 and IE6 users will move at least to IE7. Why? Because I have to maintain a Java Applet for my company and I hope that IE7 comes without a MS Java Plugin, so I finally can get rid of all this Java 1.1 code.
Downloading TV shows (outside US/UK/AUS/...) has another advantage: You get the original and not a stupid dubbed version where they ruin all the jokes with bad translations.
I already asked my TV provider whether the original audio feed will be broadcasted with DVB. The simple answer was no, due to right issues.
So the only chance of watching the original show is to wait until the DVD comes out.
Well, on the backside of my T40p it says "Manufactured for IBM Corporation Armonk, New York, USA. Made in China" already. And this is not a modell I bought at a trip to the future and brought it back to present in a time machine.
The USA is not becoming a third world country, it's more like the former second and third world countries are finally beginning to catch up. And this can only be a good thing for working conditions over there. Isn't that what development aid is for?
And now that these countries start to play on the global market, the "old economies" and its citizens are complaining "their" technology would be sold out. How pathetic!
Stop being lazy, face the changing conditions on the global market, prepare yourself and also look at the great opportunities of it. As a US citizen you should be the last one complaining about knowledge transfer, because 1 out of 2 of your leading engineers and scientists are not of American origin.
On this point you are right. These scientists go to the US because of better working conditions, more money, but health care? I doubt it. Freedoms? The US government has been cutting them for quite a few years and I don't see a change of this trend. But nobody forces you to buy products produced by kids for 5 cents/hour. And nobody stops you showing evidence that this happens.
It can be a good thing seeing western companies investing in the Chinese market or selling divisions to Chinese companies, if the deal includes that the working conditions over there have to meet certain standards.
Really? What about Microsoft GmbH, also seated near Munich and its employees? They don't code for food and they spend their money on goods produced in the Munich area, so the vast majority of the money won't leave the country.
;)
And even if, the guys in Redmond buy Mercedes (Stuttgart), Porsche (Zuffenhausen) and BMW (Munich) anyway with the money they earn so it all comes back.
My point is, you can't blame companies for making money, that's what business is about. Free software is about free as in speech, not as in beer. Money is not a valid argument in these discussions.
Actually no, according to an article by the heise lawyer in the recent issue (sorry, no links, I only have the printed version) of German computer magazine c't - it may be different in other countries.
If somebody shares illegal data using your access point whithout your knowledge and the police stops by it's your responsibility to show them that it wasn't you sharing all these warez, kiddie porn and MP3s. So if you plan on making your AP a hotspot, you should really think about how to create detailed log files of all the traffic going through.
I don't know if Linus would pronounce SuSE correctly, but you could listen to the press conference Novell and SuSE held, where I think Richard Seibt (former CEO of SuSE) pronounces SuSE several times:
press conference: Novell to Acquire SUSE LINUX
It has something to do with beer:
Fedora devel mailinglist
From Wikipedia:
Strictly defined, spyware is computer software that gathers information about a computer user without the user's knowledge or informed consent, and then transmits this information to an organisation that expects to be able to profit from it in some way.
Ok, this is not spyware - strictly defined and mentioned on the NETI@home webpage in every second sentence.
There are a lot more usefull distributed computing projects out there (folding@home for example), and why is everyone starting such a project? What will the data be used for? "To make the Internet a better place"? Yeah, right, I'm so convinced.
Before I participate in such a project, I would like to have much more information about what results are expected and what the consequences will be. This sounds more like they don't want to do the research by themselves. ISPs refuse to give away their data - they already analyze their networks and would have all the data needed. They surely don't give the data away for free as in beer - it would be better if they wouldn't do so at all.
This sounds like a really shirt-sleeved way to try to improve "The Internet". From a university I would expect a more sophisticated way, say, in improving protocols, arguing about and convincing the industry to switch to IPv6 and so on...
You can use apt-rpm with SuSE, too: http://linux01.gwdg.de/apt4rpm/. The SuSE way would be using YaST/YOU for updates.
I got my Thinkpad T40p here at http://nofost.de/. This shop is an IBM business partner and has a special program for students.
The laptop came pre-installed with Win XP professional but also with a SuSE 9 pro box and a special IBM SuSE 9 CD to install a dual-boot system, doing all the repartitioning, and so on.
I can't imagine that IBM doesn't sell this special SuSE CD with their Thinkpads in the US, too.
You shouldn't have any trouble with the T41. At least my model works great. IBM (Germany) had a special offer including SuSE Pro 9 (the standard box). Additionally to that I got a special T40/T41 CD that repartitioned the harddrive (15GB Win XP, 45GB Linux ;)) and installed SuSE with all necessary modules. It went really great, no trouble at all.
Also check out www.linux-on-laptops.com. Especially for IBM laptops there are lots of pages out there describing linux installations for various distributions in-depth.
Btw: I ordered my T40p with the optional 802.11a/b/g card (standard is a/b) and installed FC1 - not because SuSE is bad, just because I'm used to RH. The card is manufactured by Philips and works just fine with the modules from madwifi (visit SourceForge). Well, with kernel 2.4.*, I still have some trouble with kernel 2.6.*.
In this case it's because the only thing you achieve with this behaviour is to lose. You should not let SCO drag you down to their own low level. They are much more experienced at that level and will beat you.
I think he makes a good point with the statement that a one minute interruption can cost 10 to 15 minutes of productivity. Maybe productivity is the wrong word here because it translates so easily into money these days. Concentration would be much better. I for myself need a room that can be locked, a telephone line that can be unplugged and a quiet and relaxed atmosphere to concentrate on the work I want to do or that I have to do.
Unfortunatly this seems to be impossible in "modern" offices, there's lots of noise (IM and E-Mail is "noise", too!), everybody thinks he just can walk in after knocking at the door without waiting for a "come in" and the phone rings permanently.
It's great that you can reach and can be reached at any time at any place today. But it would be even greater if you could not be reached some time and others would respect that. Everybody who tried to have a phone line "just for emergencies" knows how people abuse it over time...
A quick search on Google ("mplayer qt") leeds to a nice RPM package called mplayer-codecs-win32-qt-6.0-2 RPM for i386. Works just fine. rpmfind.net also lists a lot of mplayer-codecs-* packages. I'm sure there are also Debian packages around.
It's not a public computer, it's a university computer. At least at my university and other universities I know of there are usage restrictions: for study purposes only. And you are not allowed to install tools like you want, you could also be excluded from university when you get caught.
If you think you really need a tool for your student work then you have to go to the computer center, ask for it and let them install it. You are only allowed to install software in your home directory which does not need any modifications of the windows registry and fits into your small home directory (<= 40 - 100 MB usually. Enough for data and coding).
If the workstations (NT, 2000) are adminstrated properly, you are not even able to install software - as somebody mentioned before.
But the real point is: Even if it is considered to be a public computer, you expect it to be clean and usable. This is more of an attitude problem regarding public stuff and public places people seem to have. If people are able to install these tools then they should uninstall it when they leave the computer. It's like taking your empty bottles with you when you go for a picknick - which a lot of people just leave there.
According to his homepage he is a US citizen. But the German name Reiser would be pronounced like you suggested.
Hmmm, a short lookup in my almanac told me that Croatia has the Kuna as official currency. But a search on Google (http://www.rferl.org/nca/features/2000/11/1411200 0200134.asp)
brought up this article which reports that Montenegro adopted the mark but transferred to the Euro in January 2002. This was also the time when the Euro became the official currency in France, Germany and all the other Euro countries.
Only if you write it with an umlaut ö instead of o. This joke is as old as the name I think. The origin of the name 'Vogler' is in the tradition of naming after a profession. A 'Vogler' is a person who catches birds and sells or trains them (falconer) for hunting.
It's waterproof after DIN 8310. Sorry, www.din.de would like to have 23,50 Euros for this norm so I can't get you the link. But DIN 8310 meens: 30 minutes in 1m (3.28 ft) water depth, 90 seconds in 20 meters (65.62 ft).
So, you can wash your hands or take a shower wearing it, but not much more.
On the "information" page it says that this watch only supports USB 1.0/1.1. Hey, but it's still a nice gadget.
No, Austria has the Euro, too. Maybe it's just for the "feeling". Lots of people in the Euro zone still translate into their old currency (like here into German marks). Another interesting thing about the old currencies is that Croatia, for example, still has the German mark as their currency. So this currency is still alive.
;)
The order form also said something about "shipping in the EU zone". Maybe this is the reason why some Americans here in the forum had problems getting their watch? I remember ordering some T-Shirts from a US based company for our linux user group (from thinkgeek) and we had to pay a lot of customs duty and actually drive to the airport to get our package.
It's in this case cheaper and less stressful to have a friend in Europe (or for the other way in the US) who buys the product and sends it to you via snake mail and makes sure he marks it as "GIFT, BELOW $20". Huh, reminds me of the days when the GDR existed and we send chocolate to our cousins in eastern Germany.