The collected works of guardian452 - Page 17

I have an Ikea "L" shape desk from the Galant series. I think this configuration is within your budget, or maybe $10-20 over, I don't remember exactly, but it was certainly under $300. It has a steel frame, no worries with huge CRT monitors if you're into that sort of stuff. No worries with my 200-lbs self dancing all over it to hang up xmas lights in the window last winter. (the window is about 11 ft. tall, need to get some solar-shades for this summer.) The feet are adjustable and very sturdy in the L shape.. I don't know if it would be as sturdy with only 2 legs but I bet it is. They have accessories such as cable raceways and keyboard shelves if necessary.

Notice how it completely dwarves a 20" ACD. I need a new monitor Most of my tools and stuff I have been leaving at my shop at work, so it is kinda empty now. And if you need a sturdy chair for <$20 that won't fall apart, you probably want one like this



I have moved twice since that photo was taken (not by choice) but I have been at my current apt at for about a year now and just signed another 18 month lease so... Here's the old setup:
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=16721688&p=7360667&hilit=#p7360667

As for your floor, two simple options are either rubber feet for your boxes or a simple rug.

The dual carrier is not absolutely required; if you are careful you can wedge two vpros in there without it

foetz wrote: 6000 bucks?

Worth it for the lower side panels I never did find them for crimson or onyx... this one is in remarkably good shape but the price just reconfirms the ebay inflation syndrome I thought a crimson for $250 was pricey. After all, not long before that they were being given away for free!

It was either upgraded or at some point the top hat or back panel was replaced because the nameplate says VGX but the top hat says RealityEngine. My transpotting skills aren't what they used to be, I can't tell just by looking at the cardcage anymore. (guessing realityengine based on the 2RMs and DG in RE positions with the similar-to-RE2 style frontplane)

Skywriter's old page has a lot of good photos of machines of this vintage and older http://www.nekochan.net/~skywriter/

None of the box without the skins, which I'm sorry to say isn't all that exciting. The just look like a big metal box.

A while back I put a 'teardown' of my onyx on ifixit.com
https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Silicon ... down/12546

OK, here is where the real magic happens (: I have the opposite problem as uunix... too much light, should have taken some photos today, it was overcast.

VenomousPinecone wrote: My home office and favorite L desk disappeared with the arrival of children. I have a couch and a laptop now.

Another nice thing about loosing my "home office" (I am really looking forward to this "children" thing happening) is that my work office will get much nicer furniture.

I chopped a square hole in the front fan grille of one of my octanes because the fan had failed and it's replacement was too thick to fit otherwise. Moved a decent amount of air and couldn't hear it over the PS fan, which isn't saying much.

Pick your weapon (dremel, air saw, etc) and go to town. Only downside is pulling the frontplane board off first, which has at least a dozen screws, but it isn't difficult. (and you must do first to get at the fan, anyways, if you are going to replace it.

Once you have chopped a suitable hole, the frontplane will no longer require disassembly to replace the fan.

I love these old machines! Never had one, and the prices make a homebrew 8bit just as reasonable.

Which could be a good possibility for a floppy controller or video board, you can always make your own from a published kit. There must be a couple to choose from for S-100 systems.

Congrats!

I still like my nike sportband the most. It does it's job well and when it breaks down a new replacement can be had for $20-$30 if you are not picky about the color. They do tend to stop working after two or so years, maybe 3000 miles of running for me. I think I'm on #4 now... I like it even more than the micoach smart run (2012 $500 android based smart watch with music player, training program, datalogger, and GPS) I have a HRM attachment for it (the sportband), even.

No GPS is a glaring ommission from apple's offering, since I was told that their watch can't even use a nike+ipod sensor, how on earth will it work for running with no gps or footpod sensor???

I'll probably get one once the early adoption fever dies down, because it looks like a fun and cool toy . I only ever take my (work-supplied) iphone to work and leave it at home for everything else. Unless it is working hours I keep DND on. These behaviors are for my sanity and I'm not about to change them. I do like the idea of the watch replacing my keys and wallet, but the notifications and etc, are lost to me

Anecdotes about the watch helping to wean people off of their (larger-screen devices) in the press from the reviews are flabbergasting to me. Really? You're how old, yet you need a glorified game boy to function normally??

Iphone 4? Man, that's rough. No BLE. I still have the BLE dongle you were supposed to use with the Nike+ sport sensor in case you have an original iphone up to iphone 4. For my senior project at school I did something similar about a year before the nike+ sport kit (a.k.a. TR1) but, because BLE wasn't around (my project all ran with the g2 ipod touch) I used ANT (thisisant.com) with 30-pin dongles. ANT is a proprietary protocol, but very simple and easy to use. I now work in automotive, and see that ANT is strikingly similar to CAN It's relatively unencumbered for people who want to play with it, but because BLE is so pervasive nowadays you would be foolish to use anything else unless the project is strictly for personal or educational use. Anyways, for newer devices you are supposed to throw away all your old Nike+ kit and use the GPS.

I think the 4S is the watershed point for iphones. I still use my 4S for pillow app (instead of a regular alarm clock) but there is no SIM, I turn off wifi and BT, and keep it in airplane mode. The app is supposed to work under your pillow so I would like to avoid as much irradiation as possible With the new continuity features if I forget to shut it down sometimes it will ring even without a SIM I agree, it would be nice if health app would sync data across devices. I haven't figured out a way to do it, yet.

I use my sportband when I run sometimes with and sometimes without the HRM. If I want music I have an ancient ipod nano that refuses to die no matter how hard I try to kill it, and cheap-o headphones (with a wire ). I do use the nike+ app (GPS) on my phone (5S) occasionally, maybe once a week or so, but last November I updated it (improvements to support healthkit), that broke so many things including the ability to play music while running (!) I quickly uninstalled the new version and went back to the old one (4.5.6 circa 2013).

The smart run is cool but I would avoid anything that says micoach on it. Every single device (pacer, smart cell (for F50 of course!), smart run, zone) I've bought I have had to return, sometimes 2 or 3 times, to get one that works. I like to extoll the quality of german products normally but whoever actually designed and is making that crap for adidas has big issues.

If apple made a sort of iphone nano or iphone sport (about the same size as ipod nano, but with maybe the same feature set as a 5 or 5s, cost maybe $400-500, and waterproof or at least IP66), I'd buy it in a heartbeat.

smj wrote: How can you possibly be active without your iPhone? How will people see that you're hip and with-it? Srsly, they want to use the M7 "activity processor" that's only in your phone so far, right? I'm sure they'll cram an M7 into a watch case a few versions down the road.

People can see that I'm hip-and-with-it at a race or on a track with nothing more than a stopwatch No iPhone necessary.

smj wrote: I was not thrilled when I learned that, in the shift to BLE/BT4.0, Apple had abandoned all the prior activity telemetry. (I went from iPhone 4 -> 6) Not surprised, no - this is Apple after all. But the last time I tried to sync the iPod nano I think I got a "yeah, piss off" WRT the old Nike+iPod stuff. I still have assorted old iPods, the Nike bits, and a Polar WearLink heartrate monitor, and sortof wish I could get that data from my hikes into Healthkit. But not enough to put much effort into it - just enough to gripe...

I haven't tried this because I am still using the aforementioned old version of nike+, but it may be possible to sync all of your ipod/sportband data from nike+ to healthkit. If I run with my sportband, the nike app will pull down the data. With the new healthkit version of the app (which, I don't use, but nothing to stop you from trying...), it may stuff it all in there.

Nike+ has a great api and developer interface. You can do whatever you want with that data This would be too much effort for me, but you could even write a healthkit app to sync with Nike+. All of the bits are there. Beyond that, there is manual entry, or use something other than healthkit. There is e.g. sporttracks and I would use it if I really cared that much; but all I really care to see is miles e.g. weekly and last 30 days, so ST is totally overkill. Not to mention Excel is great for this sort of stuff too, and chances are you already own it (or, openoffice, iwork, etc, etc)... The beautiful thing is there is really not that much data there, so it is easy to play with.

P.S. Nike needs to bring back the mini-me avatars!

I use eagle professionally (OSX) and tried kicad but didn't like it. I think for my next PCB project I will try to learn the gEDA packages, because I keep putting it off (I say this every time I start a new project, I will do it in, or at least try, gEDA... but it never happens) And I have to have my next project (new j1772 interface...) in time for summer. So maybe it will happen this time!

http://money.cnn.com/2015/04/08/technol ... -tracking/

If you wish to participate in a program like this, but don't want to have to, you know, actually move... send me your device. I will wear it while running at least 30+miles per week, for a 'small fee' which could be guaranteed to be less than your insurance savings If I can get enough subscribers to my service I may even develop significant upper body strength from wearing a couple dozen or more tracking machine

Adrenaline wrote: Similar feelings, but after having a Microsoft Band since November, at first I wasn't sold on it, but having the notifications for email, SMS, phone calls etc. is extremely useful. I couldn't imagine not having it at this point. Step counter, calorie counting, sleep tracking and Cortana integration are just icing on the cake.

It'll be interesting in the next year where the wearables market goes.

The MS band looks much sleeker than applewatch, IMO. Hmmm...

ivelegacy wrote: Adium on MacOSX seems to be working but i can't see anyone on IRC, i mean i am usually contacted by friends that see me on the channel while i am not able to se anyone. If you see me and want to have a call, feel free to call me as i do not see any events (people entering a channel, people leaving, i do not see anything)

sometimes i am used to use a more serious irc client on linux, but it's a more rare event

I use irssi, it is in ports. FYI I don't see your nick in #nekochan right now (mine is mjw)

For the record, I tried out adium and it had no trouble connecting and joining the channel (the latest version 1.5.10)

Worked fine for me, I even talked to alver with it. But, I still prefer irssi... Anyways, did you try the latest version, and maybe blow away your old config files first? https://adium.im/help/pgs/Miscellaneous ... Files.html

I had a compaq PC which was somewhat similar to indigo2 internally. Mainboard with a riser in the middle for pci/eisa. It was fairly common in the mid 90s.

Besides, the pizzabox form factor such as indy makes sense when you think that the largest component is the mainboard/planer PCB, so the box should be relatively flat too.

This form factor, prior to xU-standardized rack mounted equipment, also allowed for greater density when placed in racks.

When are *all* workstations going to having the cpus and gpus mounted to the same giant heatsink with one bigass fan to cool it all? (ala trash can) It doesn't make much sense anymore to do it the old way...

I saw the 8088MPH demo a few weeks ago, and didn't appreciate the 1K colo(u)rs because (a) I do not care about the CGA or whatever old dinosaur they were using; and (b) if it was such a brilliant hack I surely wouldn't have been able to understand it.

Demoscene stuff IMO is only a few steps above overclocking/synthetic benchmarking on the futility scale... Although I was fascinated by it when I was a kid. (I think the shininess had worn off by the time I was 14-15)

However, after reading the description, not only can I see it's brilliance, I can actually understand it! (Kinda makes you wonder why IBM didn't have a high-color CGA mode like this, back in the day...)


NOW we just need an emulator that it will run in

[[C|-|E]] wrote:

jan-jaap wrote:
I usually don't keep PC hardware around long enough to compare it to my SGI's in terms of reliability. It's easy to complain about the (un)reliability of the PSU of a 1990 vintage 4D PowerSeries, but the truth is I have no idea whether a PC from that era would still work because I just don't have them. My experience with 'PC' server hardware is quite good as far as reliability goes, but I use Tyan or Supermicro boards, Xeon CPUs and ECC memory, and I retire them after ~ 5 years, before they fail. My current PC workstation is an HP Z600 with two hexacore Xeons and 48GB RAM -- best PC I ever saw. Side panels in solid aluminum, sounds like a vault door when you close them.

This is a very interesting discussion and I think that you really have a very valid point here. I know that we tend to mock Dells and many other PCs from particular vendors but in my hands they are super-reliable work-horses. My workstation in the lab is still a Dell T5400 from 2008 and it has been working 24/7 since we bought it, only stopping for the upgrades. It is a rock-solid machine and still quite fast for today standards. The same is true for many other old Dells, like the Optiplex 745 or 755 we have here, that have been silently working for many many years in a dark corner full of dust. I could say the same of the HPs or the Lenovos. I am running a cluster of many little Quad Core M57P Lenovos with 8Gb of RAM per unit and they have been performing flawlessly for years and years. My O2 has never failed, but I would not dare to let her ON for such a long time .

I will put another quarter in that slot. My Mac Pro is a brick house, and the HP xw9300 before it was even more beefy (I love, love, love, the way HP did their drive rails...) I have had two whitebox peecees with intel motherboards, a d850GB (threw away years ago only because it was too slow and old, it was reliable enough up to the end...) and a dp43TF which I still have and use for games (to replace it will probably be an alienware laptop, technically also dell). Never had a problem with it although I built it 6 or 7 years ago and should probably blow all the dust and crap out of there, someday...

A 2006-era mac is similar vintage to an O350, also a unix machine, much faster, and a fraction of the cost. The xw9300 would have been contemporary with an O300 or maybe a bit older, I know the guy who bought it still uses it (for his kids to play games, etc, on)

uunix wrote: Lets face it.. owning SGI gear is like owning a classic car.. consistent maintenance.

Unlike a car, however, there are very rarely warning signs in a computer that something is about to blow up such as strange sounds or bad gas milage. You just push the power button one day and either nothing happens or smoke starts pouring out

this is only one of many similar examples and the reason why i never considered x86 nor linux to be professional gear.

What do you call 'professional' gear? I would consider what people use at work, and where I work at (the head office, at least) most either have imacs or the cheapest dell/hp laptop the IT dept. could find. When it breaks down they just ship it back. If it is 3 years old and/or out of warranty they just replace it. If you are loosing billable or working time over a peecee you are doing something wrong. If my work macbook were to go tits-up they just provide a new one and it takes maybe an hour to restore from backup. IT more than likely already has a few spares sitting around already if anybody needs them.

What you consider 'professional' is what I consider 'hobby toys'. People don't do work with finicky old computers anymore or else they will go crazy (viz. the OP )

foetz wrote: i cloned the disk 2 times and booted the other 2. one of the others however didn't wanna run.

This story reminds me of some issues I've had in the past. It is often not enough to have the same model. Even within the same *revision* some vendors will swap out a chip e.g. wifi, audio, etc, which can cause issues. I have a model number A1502 macbook and while the clockspeed or ram amount might be different, all of the other parts within that model are identical.

A lot of vendors such as dell or HP will run out of the turbofrazzler7400 widget and substitute a vickytron9000 instead. Or even next year's turbofrazzler7402 (could be the exact same part and maybe only the PCI-ID has changed!) Same performance specs, sure. But a new driver is required, and your cloned disk won't work anymore even though the Model and Revision numbers are the same. I have been bit by this issue a few times as well even with the dell optiplex or whatever their business line is. However, apple buys in such large quantities that, if nothing else, such practices would quickly eat into their profits.

The reason for me to endure some of the problems with SGI gear is the same reason I love the older hotrods and muscle cars, style.

Which is great. Those cars aren't working to make money like a delivery truck or rented van. This analogy works perfectly. Company cars are not Triumph TR7s . They are camrys, escapes, malibus. (well, I have an escape/kuga, and think it is quite swell )

foetz wrote: a control system for a power plant has of course very different priorities than an instagram uploader for ios

As somebody who has many years of experience developing for very large industrial automation systems, e.x. many racks of RS5000 on up to entire plants running on one system, I now develop for low-volume (100<(units/year)<1000) automotive ECUs using STW . We used to use a delphi controller with matlab toolchain but the licensing terms were too restrictive.

I don't have an instagram account and my IOS stuff is a side project as a low cost alternative for a diagnostic tool.

I can guaran-fucking-tee you that none of that stuff comes from IT vendors such as: "nec sx series, superdome, the remains of sun and last but not least the ibm".

of course

I have a 1.4ghz c2d macbook air and it is fast, considering what it is. It cannot play the latest games but e.g. unreal tournament (2004) and halo are fine. It can even browse the web, and play youtube videos fullscreen. (although I don't have flash player installed on any machine so that probably helps somewhat). However, it will get noisy if it is compiling for more than a few minutes, the 4x3.0ghz mac pro runs rings around it

I have not had performance issues with my i5 mac but since it was updated to 10.10 I have had lots of little issues. e.g. wifi disconnecting, etc. It doesn't do that anymore so maybe an update fixed it? My Apple-branded bluetooth kb+mouse became so unreliable I went back to USB and use the BT stuff with my mac pro at home. They worked just fine up through 10.9.

If macs couldn't type anymore I would say there is a problem. More likely your machine is broken. (the NSA has installed a spyware for you??)

Yeah I tend to pop in once in a while but this is on and off... Once every few years I will stick around for a few weeks or months. This is one of those times. The last time was circa 2010, and before that 2007...

Whaaa? Look at the date! I've been clean/sober for over a year now! I've really cleaned up my act! I swear, officer! The only advanced visualizations in this house are coming from an xbox one!

But maybe something like an indy wouldn't be that big of a deal, maybe if I keep them small...

IBM T221. 22", 3840x2400. Was a very nice screen up until recently but now there are a large glut of 24"-ish 4K displays with better connectivity options. These new models have pushed the T221 prices way down.

The OP is in RU so it only makes sense to use an .ru site... I had no problem seeing the pictures and the site works fine. Safari with js turned off, no flash, and adblock. These things also exist for the old fireboxes popular for irix. To do otherwise is a www death wish

The link is direct so you should be able to see it in your status bar before you click on it. Seems excessively nationalist to me, like the "let's block all of .cn" mentality that some people tend to.

I have no issues seeing the pictures even with a vanilla browser... It only makes sense for an RU user to use an RU site. However, it is preferred that you upload the photos directly to nekochan.

hamei wrote: But I can tell you right now, you're mistaken. Indigo Magic sings at high resolutions

Even windows is getting fairly decent given the glut of inexpensive hi-dpi laptops and tablets out there. The issue is that it isn't super easy for programmers to implement, so a lot of the lazier ones don't bother (E.g. 3S CodeSys simply gives an error message if you start it with dpi at anything other than 100% ) OSX still has the simplest hi-dpi solution, but it's also the least flexible (either 1x or 2x, and scale up or down from that). So most mac programs support it now, but there is only so much you can do (either ~100 (standard) or ~200 (retina) dpi, if you want it inbetween the GPU must scale the framebuffer; it works well enough but is not totally ideal. I have two 2560x1600 screens, one is 13" and one is 27" so, it works.

No shock Irix knows how to handle different resolutions (dpi's) as one of the very first things I played with when I got started with it was the scaling scrollwheel of the vectorized icons

I once worked my ass off for a "startup" that was all about taking investors' money while NOT paying their employees (AKA ME). Now I work for a real company that while is younger than the "startup", is actually profitable and pays their employees. And taxes. And rent. And bills. (Yes, it's tons of fun working in the dark while the owner of the company tries to negotiate paying the electric bill with millions of worthless shares of stock... and having to always be looking for new suppliers because they never pay their invoices).

I worked there from March-December 2013, and only last April (2015) have I recovered from the debt that hellhole put me into. Because if they don't pay you, you can't pay your rent, etc. It's a slippery slope, and in most states you will have ZERO recourse. If you are in a salaried position or receive ANY benefits, in the state of Ohio at least, chances are pretty good your employer technically doesn't have to pay you

Stay away from any place that is publicly traded (or has more than 1 or 2 owners/investors) but doesn't make a profit or claims to be "pre-revenue". I would recommend staying away from any place that is pre-revenue unless you don't need a regular paycheck. Or any paycheck.

I can't stay away from the fact that when I had to take my wife to the ER, my insurance was denied because even though the employer was deducting the insurance from the check (I did get one every now and then...) they of course weren't paying BCBS the premium. However, because they had only given me one check in the last 90 days, I qualified for low income assistance

Your employer can fuck with you in any number of ways. The issue with this place was, they all went to the same church (catholic), so long as they repented on Sunday I reckon what they did to their employees was OK.

Full disclosure, because it's not a story unless you name-names,
The old place I used to work at (they are still in business, of course!) http://ampelectricvehicles.com
Perhaps more interesting, keep in mind they have never delivered a single commercial vehicle to a customer, http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=AMPD
You cannot divide by 0 which is why P/E is unavailable

I made it a bit further than 3 paragraphs (about 6, maybe. Hilarious stuff, if you have a sense of humor and a strong constitution), but... pretty sure I'm not the intended target of this obvious troll. Putting up with bullshit like that is part of why I don't want to finish my MS.

I wonder where the one with "Ed McMuffin" is...

http://www.engology.com/eng5clark.htm

Clark and McCracken fought bitterly and at one point Clark replaced the nameplate on the chief executive's door with one reading `Ed McMuffin'. It is said that Ed took three days to notice the switch. Clark quit and looked for something new. He was not poor, but he was a pauper compared to the guys who had bought his equity at fire-sale prices.

We are really looking forward to the new JP... it is going to be sweet.

I saw a t-shirt that said "That Shit CRAY" and had a picture of a cray-1 outline on it. Anybody know where I can buy one like that ?

I keep getting notifications ex. "hamei has posted in Winnetou Died" but when I click on the link there is no new post there... now when I click the link I get:
viewtopic.php?p=7380246#p7380246
"The requested topic does not exist."

It's a buggy feature, for sure

Windows now comes with a built-in 3D cad program that appears to be targeted towards beginner 3D printing. Not a bad effort You can also order prints directly though their service...

hamei wrote:

calvin wrote: Likely for Hololens.

<br abp="397">Looks like something else to me ... naughty boy, guardian

calvin wrote: Likely for Hololens.

Why not both? Having some X-rated material for the HoloLens will surely help it's adoption rate

Just saw this film, it was pretty shitty. Good analogy to that monster they cooked up: noisier and with more teeth, but... not really a dinosaur.

In IMAX three-dee, of course ! (which is where you sit in the same theater and look at the same screen as normal but they turn the sound volume up a bit for an extra $2, still, totally worth it

Despite spending a lot of time on the setup, we didn't get to see all that much of the park. From what we did see, it seemed like a pretty poor experience. Piss-poor crowd control and layout. Maybe they should have hired a consultant who actually... knew how to run a theme park Which is disappointing because Universal's park is one of my favorites. It's like they were trying to make a depressing and poorly managed version of Disneyland. Which is great, except we didn't get to see very much of it. Lots of avenues for plot twists here that they didn't bother with. Why not have an evacuation plan of sorts (of course they would) and then have it go wrong, etc? Example, Disney has the famous underground tunnels and bunker for worker transportation and also enough provisions to support a capacity population for years if there is a catastrophe..

chicaneuk wrote: Were there any nods to SGI anywhere? Was hoping there might be some workstations pictured on a desk, etc etc but I figure that'd be too much to hope for!

There was of course product placement for computers just like in the first film. Substitute SGI and Thinking Machine for Samsung, and you are in business. There were nods to the first film, some old props were bandied about, etc. They made a point of talking about the original Jurassic Park to be a taboo. I never saw JP 2 or 3, so there may have been more references there. Most 90s cartoons have thicker plots. The special effects were great but that's a bad excuse for not having a plot.

It is about on par with most movies put out nowadays, lots of flash and dazzle but no story. It is a good movie if you don't care about story, characters, subplot, etc, etc. If you just want to see dinosaurs in a kinda crappy and overcrowded theme park, without too much of the theme park, this is your film.

I'm sure Disney will manage about the same with the new Star Wars. (If they wanted to do it right, they would take the story from the Thrawn series and make that a new film trilogy. Rather than.... a story that wouldn't have made it as a clone wars episode. But that's just IMO of course)

shyouko wrote: I read the heroine ran all the time with her heels throughout the movie...

Substitute "heels" for 7" stilletos, and add "the 1600M Olympic finals while being eaten by dinosaurs" after "ran" for a better effect


a comment from a few months ago:

The released trailers have clearly shown their is only one major threat so far. Hopefully there is more.
Park is open.
Crazy carnivore gets loose.
Park collapses.
Carnivore is somehow eaten by large aquatic dino.
The End.
I hope I'm mistaken, but it appears too predictable at this point.

Just about sums it up.

Also, it took too long for the fat American businessman to be eaten, but there was a collective "finally" in the theater when he was. Yet he was no villain, just an idiot.

jsloan wrote: I think the Bunnie Huang laptop has a northbridge in it. There are one or two "golden" old thinkpads that the super-free diehards always recommend, but I don't know if those are old enough to not have northbridge.

I have an x220, runs well enough. It meets my needs for games and music but if you are seriously concerned about security, don't use a computer. At all. I hardly ever even browse the web anymore, unless I have to email and I'm not at work. It is about the same size as my old macbook air but faster than even my big mac pro.

Just keep using your macbook with OSX, which is presumably why you bought the damned thing in the first place. Keep it up to date and try not to think about our corporate and government overlords too much. I still have a macbook at the office and it meets my needs although boring but work tools are supposed to just do their job and get out of the way, which it does a very good job of.

The x220 is thinkpad #4 for me, after an a21,x30,x40. All of them I have fond memories of. I'm sure there are bad thinkpads but I haven't seen any. Avoid anything too old and anything 'gamer' oriented unless brand new. Mine was refurbished with warranty and windows professional license for $280 from the local e-recycler. It looks brand new

hamei wrote: Do helicopters really have "Hover" buttons ? If so, why not add "Forward", "Back", "Left" and "Right" buttons and get rid of the $100,000/year pilot ?

They do, and you can even get a miniature version for yourself... I have one like this... http://www.seeedstudio.com/depot/Crazyf ... -1365.html

Due to guardian's ruthess review, we saw San Andreas last night instead. It left me wondering :

eeeh... it was not a *good* movie, but still worth seeing. Not up to the standards set by JP but on par with any of the other movies out right now.

vishnu wrote: Speaking of Nvidia an EVGA Geforce 5700 that I'd been using for, let's see, eleven and a half years ate itself last night.

BD,DT; Still have my mousepad...


Here's another vote for FreeBSD, always wanted to try Maxx but did not want to go back to Linux. I would put freebsd on my thinkpad just for Maxx