ATI's support for drivers has sucked for a long time...
I have a 5 year old Dell (Inspiron 7500), with an 8MB ATI chipset - IIRC it's called the Rage Mobility. I think it's Mach64 based.
Under Windows, it has some basic 3D support and can use an external display as a second desktop.
Under Linux, which is what I primarily use, I had to wait quite a while before the driver supported hardware blitting! Even now, some of the hardware features are not supported, and not just 3D or multiple screens either. I do not see that they ever will be.
I've heard people say that ATI is supposed to be supportive of open source, but I don't see it. The developers of the driver did a very good job, but did not have the information necessary to complete it.
I have a desktop Linux machine with a TNT2 in it. The nVidia drivers have worked just fine, even if they didn't come with the distribution (although SuSE can very easily download them). I could even play Enemy Territory on it (very slowly, but it did work).
I am planning on buying a new laptop this year, and I will be buying an AMD64 one with an nVidia chipset. Unfortunately, the choice is limited, but they do exist. ATI's support for 64bit operating systems has been limited, as has their support for Linux, and the last time I looked, 64bit Linux drivers w/ 3D support for ATI cards didn't exist. OTOH, nVidia have had their 64bit Linux drivers available for a while now.
The 64bit Windows will probably be out in around half a year from now, and I suspect that a lot of people are interested in getting 64bit machines once it becomes available. If ATI's drivers suck (as has often been the case in the past), people will want nVidia, as that is the mainstream alternative. ATI's drivers could well lose them their top spot.
It actually sounded plausible, until I realised they weren't talking about some new type of battery technology but rather a sticker.
I absolutely do believe it is possible to extend battery technology so they can hold more charge, last longer and so on, and then produce new generations of battery that have these features. I don't believe for one second that it's possible to have any such effect on an existing battery (at least, not without disassembling it).
Is unbreakable encryption even theoretically possible?
I would say not.
It's really a matter of definition more than anything else. Encrypting something is generally assumed to mean turning it into something which is unrecognisable as the original, but which can be converted back (decrypted).
If there is a way of converting it back, it must be theoretically possible to find out how, thus it is breakable. Of course, it might be so difficult or take so long that it was unfeasable. That would make the encryption effectively unbreakable, but that's not the same as being truely unbreakable.
Of course, if there is no way of converting "encrypted" data back to its original form, you couldn't really call it encryption - that'd be hashing (as was done with the Unix password). Hashing can unbreakable in the sense that you can't get directly back to the original from the hashed data, but it's still possible to brute-force going forwards, by trying every combination until one matches.
Having unbreakable encryption isn't necessary IMO. The encryption needs only to be strong enough that it can't be cracked within the time period in which the data must remain secret.
I have to say, it looks like those in France are indeed getting a very good deal. I'm assuming that it's via cable not DSL, as you have the TV option, not that it makes any real difference as far as the computer is concerned.
It so happens that today I'm signing up for a new phone service (in Germany). The DSL part, including fastpath, costs 10 Euros/month (1024Kbit down, 128 up, 1000MB/month). It's not capped though - each extra MB costs 1.2Eurocent.
Flat rate costs another 10 per month, and an upgrade to 3072 down 512 up costs another 13/month. That's the fastest I can get on a normal consumer deal.
I can get flat rate for the phone to any German land line for an extra 20 Euros/month. All in all, that would max out at 73 Euros/month for max speed flat rate internet and phone (including ISDN line rental). It's much better than my current connection costs, but nowhere the French deal.:-(
The Macs for Europe are apparently assembled in Cork, Ireland. Granted, the components come from other places, but those are generally in the Far East, not in the US. You also can't buy a Mac directly from the US if you're in Europe.
There are still shipping costs of course, but there is no extra import taxation due to the trade agreements within the EU. The only thing that differs is the VAT - 17.5% in England, 16% in Germany, 25% in Sweden etc.
As for cars... I don't know what you have, but if you live in Germany, it's cheaper to buy a VW from Spain and have it transported back, even though the car was made in Germany in the first place!
While there are legitimate reasons for increasing prices for certain regions, they real reason companies charge more is normally just because they can.
I've had worse than just quitting emacs... the shortcut for auto-indenting a block of code is CTRL-ALT-\ (backslash). The backslash on my keyboard is right under backspace; CTRL-ALT-backspace kills the X server.
Been there. Done that. More than once.:-(
Back to the original story: see that line about there being two keyboard standards today (QWERTY and Dvorak)? That's bollocks! Germans, for example, have a QWERTZ keyboard which includes the umlaut characters. Other countries have other weird and wonderful layouts, some of which look nothing like the QWERTY layout.
I have seen MD albums on sale here in Germany too, in the past. Don't see any anymore though.
I think Sony very definately missed a big opertunity. As is the case with the others, I have only really seen MDs in use by musicians, where they are still in use, but have become a niche market. For everybody else, it's much cheaper and simpler to burn mixes onto a CD - a data CD of MP3 files holds very many more minutes of music, and will be read by most CD players these days. Granted, an MD is reusable, but CDs are sooo cheap...
The reasons for the failure are not just the price of the devices, but also the lack of needed features. An MD player with digital out was very expensive (my MD walkman only has digital in). The media was expensive too. One thing that was missing from the market was an MD drive for the PC - I would have loved something that could have read/written my audio MDs directly; better still would have been if you could have stored normal data on the disks, which IIRC had a capacity of about 120MB. Back then, that could have been a very strong competitor against the ZIP drives.
That's not all! Different users on the same machine can have their desktop and apps in whichever language they choose, as long as the relevant i18n pack has been installed. Some other programs support this behaviour too (eg: give out different messages according to $LANG).
Having localised builds sucks, IMnsHO. OOo and Firefox are only available in one language at a time. I don't want to install two complete copies and start fiddling with paths, so I'm limited to only one language.
What's the guarantee that the EULA you read online is the EULA that's presented by the software?
There is no guarantee of that. However, one of the points made was that EULAs must be available when the purchase is made; these must thefore be the ones that are guaranteed to be the correct ones. It seems to me that the online thing is nothing more than a preview for convenience's sake. Any paper EULA (presented to a buyer at the time of sale) which differs from the electronic one included with the software might be legitimate grounds for a case of fraud.
You have the possibility of three different EULAs, but one of them has carry more weight than the others in any disputes between them. This one has to be the one available at purchase time, in printed form. As you noted, EULAs on websites could be altered. Post-sale EULAs are legally questionable, and have already been ruled unenforcable in some countries - Germany, for example, ruled that the EULA must be printed on the box otherwise it can't be enforced. I think that's a good thing; it'll force some companies to be significantly more concise!
Instead of rotating subdomain names, try making a subdomain called "nospam" instead, and having your real email address be something like user@nospam.domain.com. The reasoning behind this is that spam address lists are often cleaned of such "fake" addresses - at least, that's what I gather from a spam mail which was trying to sell me spam services!
I've not actually tried this though; YMMV, caveat emptor, IANAL etc...
the few highly addictive 'hard' drugs that really do fuck people up (ice and heroin come to mind)
Ice? I didn't know that frozen water is considered a hard drug.
Oh it is hard, believe you me. Taking large amounts of ice can definately cause some serious problems. Small amounts (in drinks, for example) are not known to cause problems though.
I still like the original C&C and Red Alert. I'd be interested in seeing versions of those that actually run on XP without you having to hack them (or better still, Linux).
I did have RA working under Wine for a while, but it doesn't seem to want to at the moment.:-(
Unfortunately, the UK has plenty of roundabouts with lights. There are quite a few in the London area. Some of the lights are part time (which always makes me wonder what they are when they're not being lights), but once a certain volume of traffic is present, you're screwed either way. The real solution, for SE-England at least, would be to move a lot of the people (and companies and infrastructure) away from the south east - and have the population spread more evenly.
I've not ever been on the magic roundabout in Hemel during the rush hour, so I'm not sure if it really works all that well. The rest of the time, I don't think it makes all that difference.
Anyway, I'm glad you brought roundabouts up. Only this morning, on the way to work, I was sitting at lights waiting to turn, and getting annoyed because it was red for a while even though nothing was coming from any other direction. A mini roundabout would be a much more efficient solution than the lights, and has significantly lower maintainance costs! They've only caught on to the concept of roundabouts here in the last few years though, so there aren't very many yet. (Here == Germany)
I'll take that one step further: deliver the ISO on a DVD-RAM. Don't bother with +/- R or RW. A DVD-RAM is a much more stable medium.
While I'm here, I'd recommend the LG DVD burners. I've got one, and I know a number of others who do, and they seem to be very good. The old Plextor drives were good too; haven't tried any current ones though.
The comments posted here show that some points have been missed:
Companies are really annoyed about this whole thing. So far, the comments have been about home users. Companies would be required to pay per site.
There is a lot of opposition to the whole plan anyway, even from other politicians. It was stated that this "worldwide unique computer fee" would be in contradiction to the economic goals proclaimed by the government (and supported by the opposition).
It's not law yet! It still has to be ratified by all of the local parliaments (there is one for each German "state").
Of course, the whole thing does suck. While I can understand the fee for TV/radio, I think imposing a fee on computers just because they can connect to the internet is quite unjust.
That's not all either! Some BIOSes will recognise larger drives as being larger, but may not directly be able to access all of them. The operating system will not normally access the drive via the BIOS, so it's not too much of a problem, but the boot loader may well still need BIOS support.
This is a problem that has been continually cropping up, with boundaries at 8GB, 32GB and 128GB, among others, for various reasons (I'll leave out the technical details).
To minimise problems, make sure that your boot partion (C: drive if you're on Windows) is the first partition on the disk, and isn't larger than 128GB or so. If your laptop supports save-to-disk to a hibernate partition, that should probably also be in the first 128GB of the disk, so you could make it the first partition and your boot partition second. Just as long as both fit in.
One other thing: when I first got my laptop, I accidentally broke one of the levers to eject a PCMCIA card. Dell's tech support said explicitly that the drive should be removed before the laptop was sent in, which was easy as it's a single screw. Not all laptops are made so that parts are difficult to replace.
BTW, if the drive is being upgraded, I'd recommend more memory too!
The DP prototype board eschews the DB-15 VGA port traditionally found on Via's motherboards in favor of a DVI port for use with flat-panel displays. However, DVI is backward-compatible with AGP, so perhaps a VGA port will be snuck in under the wire before the final version of the board reaches production "early next year."
What does that mean? DVI is backward-compatible with AGP?? Sounds like somebody doesn't know what they're talking about!
I don't expect the old VGA port to reappear, as you only need to stick an adaptor in the DVI port.
Stupid FIFA has a contract with an American beer producer. Guess which. That means we can only buy American beer in the stadion.
Actually, the Germans are really pissed off at the whole thing. They are quite possibly the world leaders at making good beer, and people want to be able to get their local favourite at the games.
That's not the whole story either - the stupid FIFA have another contract with a certain American fast food maker. The problem is that nobody else is allowed to sell food, and not everybody wants crappy hamburgers.
For those who've not been around Europe: there are many varying very tasty snacks made in the various regions, and they are invariably much healthier than the above-mentioned fast food.
Not all laptops! Mine doesn't, unless configured to do so.
Actually, some laptops (and some fridges for that matter) are easy to test: there is a button that is pushed when the lid/door is closed. Under Windows, I can configure it to blank the screen, put the laptop in standby and so on. Under Linux, I haven't yet found where this is configured, but then again, I haven't looked for it!
As far as it goes with saving power: an external monitor will probably suck a lot more power than the laptop screen, and it'll definitely take much more space. I know you can turn the monitor off with the switch, but X can use DPMS to turn off the laptop screen, which saves exactly the same amount of power as when you switch from the built-in display to an external one. You can tell if it's really off because the screen isn't just blanked - the whole backlight goes off too.
Another trick: mount your partitions with atime disabled, and have the disks spin down automatically on no activity for a couple of minutes. Laptop drives have better ratings for the expected number of times you can spin up/down.
A laptop may not be ideal though. They often have much slower memory and disks than normal desktop systems. While this is plenty for a router which does a bit of NAT, http proxy and maybe some mail serving/relaying, it's not so good if you want a decent file server for your internal network.
Consider this: current versions of Outlook (and O. Express) do not support sender ID. Microsoft has said they want to kill off Outlook Express, and Outlook, as a part of Office, costs cash. People don't generally upgrade that fast. There will be plenty of people with Microsoft software that doesn't support sender ID, and Microsoft needs to retain backwards compatibility, because not doing so gives people an incentive to use another product instead.
If Microsoft make new products that mark all email without sender ID as spam (possibly meaning it isn't even seen), that will legitimately upset a lot of paying customers. The lack of sender ID then becomes effectively meaningless, and things like that do die off. It's happened to them before; sometimes they let it die, sometimes they change their tune.
Consider this: Microsoft wasn't interested in supporting TCP/IP or the Internet; they wanted everyone on their own private MSN too (not the MSN we know today).
Slashdot Mirror
ATI's support for drivers has sucked for a long time...
I have a 5 year old Dell (Inspiron 7500), with an 8MB ATI chipset - IIRC it's called the Rage Mobility. I think it's Mach64 based.
Under Windows, it has some basic 3D support and can use an external display as a second desktop.
Under Linux, which is what I primarily use, I had to wait quite a while before the driver supported hardware blitting! Even now, some of the hardware features are not supported, and not just 3D or multiple screens either. I do not see that they ever will be.
I've heard people say that ATI is supposed to be supportive of open source, but I don't see it. The developers of the driver did a very good job, but did not have the information necessary to complete it.
I have a desktop Linux machine with a TNT2 in it. The nVidia drivers have worked just fine, even if they didn't come with the distribution (although SuSE can very easily download them). I could even play Enemy Territory on it (very slowly, but it did work).
I am planning on buying a new laptop this year, and I will be buying an AMD64 one with an nVidia chipset. Unfortunately, the choice is limited, but they do exist. ATI's support for 64bit operating systems has been limited, as has their support for Linux, and the last time I looked, 64bit Linux drivers w/ 3D support for ATI cards didn't exist. OTOH, nVidia have had their 64bit Linux drivers available for a while now.
The 64bit Windows will probably be out in around half a year from now, and I suspect that a lot of people are interested in getting 64bit machines once it becomes available. If ATI's drivers suck (as has often been the case in the past), people will want nVidia, as that is the mainstream alternative. ATI's drivers could well lose them their top spot.
-- Steve
It actually sounded plausible, until I realised they weren't talking about some new type of battery technology but rather a sticker.
I absolutely do believe it is possible to extend battery technology so they can hold more charge, last longer and so on, and then produce new generations of battery that have these features. I don't believe for one second that it's possible to have any such effect on an existing battery (at least, not without disassembling it).
Well, somebody successfully spammed /.
-- Steve
Don't forget the gofaster lights on the front!
Of course, you'll only go faster if you turn them on; they are most effective during daylight hours, when there is no fog.
-- Steve
DVD+/-RW happens.
Throw DVD-RAM into the mix too...
I know you were modded as funny, but unfortunately, it is soooo true!
-- Steve
Is unbreakable encryption even theoretically possible?
I would say not.
It's really a matter of definition more than anything else. Encrypting something is generally assumed to mean turning it into something which is unrecognisable as the original, but which can be converted back (decrypted).
If there is a way of converting it back, it must be theoretically possible to find out how, thus it is breakable. Of course, it might be so difficult or take so long that it was unfeasable. That would make the encryption effectively unbreakable, but that's not the same as being truely unbreakable.
Of course, if there is no way of converting "encrypted" data back to its original form, you couldn't really call it encryption - that'd be hashing (as was done with the Unix password). Hashing can unbreakable in the sense that you can't get directly back to the original from the hashed data, but it's still possible to brute-force going forwards, by trying every combination until one matches.
Having unbreakable encryption isn't necessary IMO. The encryption needs only to be strong enough that it can't be cracked within the time period in which the data must remain secret.
-- Steve
I have to say, it looks like those in France are indeed getting a very good deal. I'm assuming that it's via cable not DSL, as you have the TV option, not that it makes any real difference as far as the computer is concerned.
It so happens that today I'm signing up for a new phone service (in Germany). The DSL part, including fastpath, costs 10 Euros/month (1024Kbit down, 128 up, 1000MB/month). It's not capped though - each extra MB costs 1.2Eurocent.
Flat rate costs another 10 per month, and an upgrade to 3072 down 512 up costs another 13/month. That's the fastest I can get on a normal consumer deal.
I can get flat rate for the phone to any German land line for an extra 20 Euros/month. All in all, that would max out at 73 Euros/month for max speed flat rate internet and phone (including ISDN line rental). It's much better than my current connection costs, but nowhere the French deal. :-(
-- Steve
Also, since Macs are built here in the US...
The Macs for Europe are apparently assembled in Cork, Ireland. Granted, the components come from other places, but those are generally in the Far East, not in the US. You also can't buy a Mac directly from the US if you're in Europe.
There are still shipping costs of course, but there is no extra import taxation due to the trade agreements within the EU. The only thing that differs is the VAT - 17.5% in England, 16% in Germany, 25% in Sweden etc.
As for cars... I don't know what you have, but if you live in Germany, it's cheaper to buy a VW from Spain and have it transported back, even though the car was made in Germany in the first place!
While there are legitimate reasons for increasing prices for certain regions, they real reason companies charge more is normally just because they can.
-- Steve
I've had worse than just quitting emacs... the shortcut for auto-indenting a block of code is CTRL-ALT-\ (backslash). The backslash on my keyboard is right under backspace; CTRL-ALT-backspace kills the X server.
Been there. Done that. More than once. :-(
Back to the original story: see that line about there being two keyboard standards today (QWERTY and Dvorak)? That's bollocks! Germans, for example, have a QWERTZ keyboard which includes the umlaut characters. Other countries have other weird and wonderful layouts, some of which look nothing like the QWERTY layout.
-- Steve
I have seen MD albums on sale here in Germany too, in the past. Don't see any anymore though.
I think Sony very definately missed a big opertunity. As is the case with the others, I have only really seen MDs in use by musicians, where they are still in use, but have become a niche market. For everybody else, it's much cheaper and simpler to burn mixes onto a CD - a data CD of MP3 files holds very many more minutes of music, and will be read by most CD players these days. Granted, an MD is reusable, but CDs are sooo cheap...
The reasons for the failure are not just the price of the devices, but also the lack of needed features. An MD player with digital out was very expensive (my MD walkman only has digital in). The media was expensive too. One thing that was missing from the market was an MD drive for the PC - I would have loved something that could have read/written my audio MDs directly; better still would have been if you could have stored normal data on the disks, which IIRC had a capacity of about 120MB. Back then, that could have been a very strong competitor against the ZIP drives.
-- Steve
Maybe someone should Godwin this thread, so it will end.
No can do! See Quirk's exception on this page: Intentional invocation of this so-called "Nazi Clause" is ineffectual.
Washing your car to make it rain doesn't work.
-- Steve
That's not all! Different users on the same machine can have their desktop and apps in whichever language they choose, as long as the relevant i18n pack has been installed. Some other programs support this behaviour too (eg: give out different messages according to $LANG).
Having localised builds sucks, IMnsHO. OOo and Firefox are only available in one language at a time. I don't want to install two complete copies and start fiddling with paths, so I'm limited to only one language.
-- Steve
Whenever I'm at the cinema, I always expect someone to jump out of the projectionist's window, blast a hole in the screen and run through it...
-- Steve
What's the guarantee that the EULA you read online is the EULA that's presented by the software?
There is no guarantee of that. However, one of the points made was that EULAs must be available when the purchase is made; these must thefore be the ones that are guaranteed to be the correct ones. It seems to me that the online thing is nothing more than a preview for convenience's sake. Any paper EULA (presented to a buyer at the time of sale) which differs from the electronic one included with the software might be legitimate grounds for a case of fraud.
You have the possibility of three different EULAs, but one of them has carry more weight than the others in any disputes between them. This one has to be the one available at purchase time, in printed form. As you noted, EULAs on websites could be altered. Post-sale EULAs are legally questionable, and have already been ruled unenforcable in some countries - Germany, for example, ruled that the EULA must be printed on the box otherwise it can't be enforced. I think that's a good thing; it'll force some companies to be significantly more concise!
-- Steve
Instead of rotating subdomain names, try making a subdomain called "nospam" instead, and having your real email address be something like user@nospam.domain.com. The reasoning behind this is that spam address lists are often cleaned of such "fake" addresses - at least, that's what I gather from a spam mail which was trying to sell me spam services!
I've not actually tried this though; YMMV, caveat emptor, IANAL etc...
-- Steve
Oh it is hard, believe you me. Taking large amounts of ice can definately cause some serious problems. Small amounts (in drinks, for example) are not known to cause problems though.
-- Steve
I still like the original C&C and Red Alert. I'd be interested in seeing versions of those that actually run on XP without you having to hack them (or better still, Linux).
I did have RA working under Wine for a while, but it doesn't seem to want to at the moment. :-(
-- Steve
Unfortunately, the UK has plenty of roundabouts with lights. There are quite a few in the London area. Some of the lights are part time (which always makes me wonder what they are when they're not being lights), but once a certain volume of traffic is present, you're screwed either way. The real solution, for SE-England at least, would be to move a lot of the people (and companies and infrastructure) away from the south east - and have the population spread more evenly.
I've not ever been on the magic roundabout in Hemel during the rush hour, so I'm not sure if it really works all that well. The rest of the time, I don't think it makes all that difference.
Anyway, I'm glad you brought roundabouts up. Only this morning, on the way to work, I was sitting at lights waiting to turn, and getting annoyed because it was red for a while even though nothing was coming from any other direction. A mini roundabout would be a much more efficient solution than the lights, and has significantly lower maintainance costs! They've only caught on to the concept of roundabouts here in the last few years though, so there aren't very many yet. (Here == Germany)
-- Steve
I'll take that one step further: deliver the ISO on a DVD-RAM. Don't bother with +/- R or RW. A DVD-RAM is a much more stable medium.
While I'm here, I'd recommend the LG DVD burners. I've got one, and I know a number of others who do, and they seem to be very good. The old Plextor drives were good too; haven't tried any current ones though.
-- Steve
Somebody can't read! It said over 100 pounds ($180).
Insert comment here about people of a certain nationality making too many assumptions about units of various things...
-- Steve
The comments posted here show that some points have been missed:
Companies are really annoyed about this whole thing. So far, the comments have been about home users. Companies would be required to pay per site.
There is a lot of opposition to the whole plan anyway, even from other politicians. It was stated that this "worldwide unique computer fee" would be in contradiction to the economic goals proclaimed by the government (and supported by the opposition).
It's not law yet! It still has to be ratified by all of the local parliaments (there is one for each German "state").
Of course, the whole thing does suck. While I can understand the fee for TV/radio, I think imposing a fee on computers just because they can connect to the internet is quite unjust.
-- Steve
That's not all either! Some BIOSes will recognise larger drives as being larger, but may not directly be able to access all of them. The operating system will not normally access the drive via the BIOS, so it's not too much of a problem, but the boot loader may well still need BIOS support.
This is a problem that has been continually cropping up, with boundaries at 8GB, 32GB and 128GB, among others, for various reasons (I'll leave out the technical details).
To minimise problems, make sure that your boot partion (C: drive if you're on Windows) is the first partition on the disk, and isn't larger than 128GB or so. If your laptop supports save-to-disk to a hibernate partition, that should probably also be in the first 128GB of the disk, so you could make it the first partition and your boot partition second. Just as long as both fit in.
One other thing: when I first got my laptop, I accidentally broke one of the levers to eject a PCMCIA card. Dell's tech support said explicitly that the drive should be removed before the laptop was sent in, which was easy as it's a single screw. Not all laptops are made so that parts are difficult to replace.
BTW, if the drive is being upgraded, I'd recommend more memory too!
-- Steve
From the article:
The DP prototype board eschews the DB-15 VGA port traditionally found on Via's motherboards in favor of a DVI port for use with flat-panel displays. However, DVI is backward-compatible with AGP, so perhaps a VGA port will be snuck in under the wire before the final version of the board reaches production "early next year."
What does that mean? DVI is backward-compatible with AGP?? Sounds like somebody doesn't know what they're talking about!
I don't expect the old VGA port to reappear, as you only need to stick an adaptor in the DVI port.
-- Steve
Stupid FIFA has a contract with an American beer producer. Guess which. That means we can only buy American beer in the stadion.
Actually, the Germans are really pissed off at the whole thing. They are quite possibly the world leaders at making good beer, and people want to be able to get their local favourite at the games.
That's not the whole story either - the stupid FIFA have another contract with a certain American fast food maker. The problem is that nobody else is allowed to sell food, and not everybody wants crappy hamburgers.
For those who've not been around Europe: there are many varying very tasty snacks made in the various regions, and they are invariably much healthier than the above-mentioned fast food.
-- Steve
Not all laptops! Mine doesn't, unless configured to do so.
Actually, some laptops (and some fridges for that matter) are easy to test: there is a button that is pushed when the lid/door is closed. Under Windows, I can configure it to blank the screen, put the laptop in standby and so on. Under Linux, I haven't yet found where this is configured, but then again, I haven't looked for it!
As far as it goes with saving power: an external monitor will probably suck a lot more power than the laptop screen, and it'll definitely take much more space. I know you can turn the monitor off with the switch, but X can use DPMS to turn off the laptop screen, which saves exactly the same amount of power as when you switch from the built-in display to an external one. You can tell if it's really off because the screen isn't just blanked - the whole backlight goes off too.
Another trick: mount your partitions with atime disabled, and have the disks spin down automatically on no activity for a couple of minutes. Laptop drives have better ratings for the expected number of times you can spin up/down.
A laptop may not be ideal though. They often have much slower memory and disks than normal desktop systems. While this is plenty for a router which does a bit of NAT, http proxy and maybe some mail serving/relaying, it's not so good if you want a decent file server for your internal network.
-- Steve
Consider this: current versions of Outlook (and O. Express) do not support sender ID. Microsoft has said they want to kill off Outlook Express, and Outlook, as a part of Office, costs cash. People don't generally upgrade that fast. There will be plenty of people with Microsoft software that doesn't support sender ID, and Microsoft needs to retain backwards compatibility, because not doing so gives people an incentive to use another product instead.
If Microsoft make new products that mark all email without sender ID as spam (possibly meaning it isn't even seen), that will legitimately upset a lot of paying customers. The lack of sender ID then becomes effectively meaningless, and things like that do die off. It's happened to them before; sometimes they let it die, sometimes they change their tune.
Consider this: Microsoft wasn't interested in supporting TCP/IP or the Internet; they wanted everyone on their own private MSN too (not the MSN we know today).
-- Steve