Tag: search

Looking for a notebook

I’ve never particularly liked notebooks. They are clumsy, uncomfortable, hot, slow, weird, and hard to fix or upgrade. And expensive, of course.

But circumstances are changing now in such a way that I’ll need to have a notebook pretty soon. We can’t manage on a single computer nomore, and there is no place to put a second one. Plus I am way too often moving around.

I am not in a hurry yet, but I can’t delay the purchase for another six month. Tha gives me enough to time to study the options and compare the prices.

So far I haven’t done any research what-so-ever. And with this knowledge I am looking for the following:

  • IBM ThinkPad T41 notebook (I’ve heard lots of positive comments about this particular line of products, and it supports Linux pretty good too.)
  • Fast CPU is not an issue. Even 1 GHz will be enough.
  • RAM is good, so I’ll need more. 1 GByte is pretty close to perfect.
  • I don’t want an elephant in the bag, but I want something bigger than my mobile, so the ideal size of the screen is 15″.
  • Well-supported video card – NVidia MX-series or something similar.
  • CD/DVD/DVD-RW is a must.
  • USB is a must.
  • WiFi card, supported by Fedora Linux 4 or later is a must.
  • 10/100 (or maybe even 10/100/1000) Mbit Ethernet adapter is a must.
  • Soundcard with line-in (read: Skype) is a must.
  • Battery life is not essential – if it can live and work for 2-4 hours, then it’s good enough. Usually, I am pretty close to power lines.

That’s pretty much what I have thought of at this moment. Any suggestions, ideas, or pointers are very welcome.

P.S.: The system will be running Fedora Linux and Fedora Linux only. No dualboots to Windows or anything crazy like that.

P.P.S.: Notebook can even be second-hand, if in good condition.

Why all the Google-China fuss

You’ve probably heard a lot about Google in the last few days. The company was all over the media because of two important issues.

The first one had something to do with their profits, and experts’ expectations of those profits. That’s all very boring unless, of course, you are a shareholder. Which I am not. So I’ll just ignore that one for now.

The second one is a bit more catchy. It’s the rise of an old question – “What happens if Google will go evil?”. Google has access to such much information that it can easily change lives of so many people both to the good and to the bad. And I am not only talking about all that information that is so easily found with Google’s search engine. Just in case you forgot or never knew – Google knows who is looking for what, where are you coming from, which languages you can read, and what browser do you use. It has also a pretty good idea about websites that you visit – which ones and how often (by means of Google advertising and Google web statistics). If you use Google Mail, they know a lot more about you, than you probably do about yourself. And so forth.

Until now though Google was pretty descent in most its politics. But a few days ago they did something in China that many people saw as an evil act.

The thing with China is that it is still a very much controlled state. There are things like government firewalls that prevent people from accessing all sorts of resources – from pornographic to political. There is a lot of censorship – who can say what and when, etc. That’s on one hand. On the other – more than a billion people. In English that means – a huge market.

So there is no surprise that everyone and anyone are trying to get their hand on China. Doing so though requires a lot of manouvering around Chinese government and its existing policies. And here is where Google came to light recently. Instead of supporting free speech and other democratic civil rights, they agreed to do a lot of filtering on the results they provide for certain keywords.

How bad is it? Well, consider an example. Bad. Very bad.

Why should you care? I don’t know. You decide for yourself.

Daily del.icio.us bookmarks

For today I have a few Bittorrent links. We all have to do our peer-2-peering once in a while, don’t we?

These were shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user tvset on 2005-08-28.

Deep Purple in Cyprus : Pictures

Ian Gillan

Finally I got my act together and processed all the pictures. Out of 250 frames I selected 125. Mostly those are of Ian Gillan with a microphone. Steve Morse with his guitar and Don Airey up at his keyboards are the next most covered. Basist Roger Glover and drummer Ian Paice were on the other side of the stage, so their pictures aren’t as spectacular as of others, but I’ve go them covered anyway.

I’d like to thank Slava who started the whole argument with the security stuff and found out that it was OK to bring in the photo camera and that only video cameras were banned. If it wasn’t for him, I would leave my camera in the car and none of this pictures would have seen the light of the Web.

Without further a do…

Album location: /photos/2005/2005-07-15_Deep_Purple_in_Cyprus