eBay!

I got 2 Thinkpad T520 laptops (Resolution: 1920x1080) for less than $1000 (total). Granted, one had a broken keyboard + bios lock and the other a broken screen - but less than $300 in parts repaired the keyboard and screen and now I have the hardware to unlock the bios password of many thinkpad models. Still, I paid less than $1000 total for both after repairs. It can be done if you're a cheap enough bastard and are willing to put in a little effort.

Not all roses though - neither came with a hard drive or memory - so that added expense did put my total above $1000 - but I have 2 high-res laptops and I spent less than $2000 for both after adding to each a 1tb hdd and 8gb ram. It's good to have a spare.

Let the previous post serve as an example of how NOT to attempt comedy on slashdot (or anywhere else).

Some pointers for would-be comedians attempting to amuse the rest of us:

1. it should be funny
2. it should be funny to someone other than yourself (your other personalities don't count, neither does your mother - and no, combining the two won't count either)
3. humor should be involved

As a litmus test, if you think you should post as AC - it isn't nearly funny enough. True comedians want to take credit for their craft.

My iPad 1 got slower and slower with each update, until IOS 5, when the updates cease. Now, many apps in the app store cannot be installed on my iPad 1 because the IOS version doesn't meet the criteria for the apps.

I keep it around because I must support iPad 1 for some of my customers, but its usefulness is fading - as designed.

For those considering to flame this AC, there are 2 jokes here which aren't funny on their own - but combined are quite amusing.

Is it a single LED that is three atoms thick, or are there 3 individual atom thick LEDs?

If the latter, 1 atom thick is just an atom. So these guys are claiming to have invented an atom.

They didn't completely remove annotation though, everything else is still there. We can still draw pretty boxes, circles, arrows and text. Those are features we don't use (often).

It just strikes me as odd that apple drops the feature, adobe drops the feature from reader, and a third party editor drops the feature - at roughly the same time.

We tried option B, and when the software received an update a few days later, link annotations were no longer available.

At that point, we went digging in the parts closet for the machines.

Personally, I think the Apple/Adobe relationship is driving this. Get people hooked on a feature, then yank that feature to force them to purchase an expensive product (Acrobat).

One piece of older OSX that is no longer in newer versions is an (apparently) often used function of Preview. The ability to add link annotations to PDF documents has been removed. You can still add text and arrows and circles (the things we don't use it for). That particular function is the most often used, but there are others.

We used it for customer reports generated in other applications. To make it easier on our customers, we would create table of contents and link it in preview before sending it out. With older Snow Leopard machines in the office, the process now must be performed on an older machine before being sent out. Of course, we are now very protective of these older machines.

There are reasons not to upgrade. Apple has silently removed features from OSX that my business has come to rely on. New equipment, of course, runs Lion or Mavericks - but we keep a few older machines around to do the tasks that Apple doesn't think we need to do anymore (tasks that require us to spend $2500 on software for Lion or Mavericks but could do in Snow Leopard).

This was done in the ancient olympic games - sort of. It wasn't really that the competitors used the same gear - they competed in the nude, covering their bodies with olive oil.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...

The positions of the planets and angular relationships isn't science? What the hell have astronomers been doing all these years?

The portion of astrology that deals with the positions of the heavenly bodies is exactly a science, and is provable FACT. When someone is born and their sun sign is, say Aquarius - this means that the sun was in Aquarius when the person was born, which is a provable FACT.

Astronomy was born from astrology. Many of the terms still used in astronomy came from astrology (conjunction, opposition, aspect, etc.)

Astrology has one non-scientific aspect (pun intended), the assignment of meaning to planetary positions and angular relationships.

While on par with most religious beliefs, at least astrology has some basis in science. Planetary positions and angular relationships between those planets isn't something that astrologers make up. The data is largely calculated from ephemeris (usually the Swiss ephemeris) and there is a lot of math involved.

If religion had as much science as astrology, everyone would believe in god.

The only thing not science about astrology is the interpreted meanings of the positions and angular relationships.

Did you come up with that all by yourself?

What's wisdom will you bestow next? here are some suggestions off the top of my head:

"the more warm something gets, the less cold it is",
"more light leads to less darkness",
"as something dies, it becomes less alive" or
"as things speed up, they move less slowly"

Thank you, Captain FormulAiC.

In my life I've had only one boss that respected IT personnel. None of them were technical, and had some strange image in their heads of a magical fairy land where us IT folk would wave our wands and shit would get done.

I had one non-programmer boss who proposed an amazing CONTACT FORM to her bosses, and I was required to be there so I could take notes and implement it. After watching her presentation, I was asked if I had any questions or comments. I had comments. Gems like: "Why am I putting EACH FIELD on a separate page? That's going to cause the users to submit the form 10 times before they're done" and "I'm supposed to look these addresses up in the CRM, but the CRM guys have plainly stated over the years that they will never ever Ever EVER let anyone query their DB, did something change?".

By the end of the meeting, the contact form was cancelled and my new task was to make a slideshow screensaver for someone's special project.

With a beam that powerful, it won't take a direct hit to the cornea to cause eye damage. Catching a glint off of the windshield of the target (car, plane, tank, building) might be enough.

Forget walking around with mirrors, battlefield dress of the future might include welding goggles or a helmet mounted HUD to protect a soldiers eyes behind a video feed.