Is there anyone on MemeStreams who regularly uses linux on their desktop?

I have to use Windows every day at work. There is something nice about my home computing environment being a little more slick. I like being able to open a unix command prompt. I like the design subtleties of my mac. Its pleasant to use. But I think it may be time to part ways.

I'm tired of Apple. My first mac, an iBook, had a problem where the screen would "go fuzzy" and require a motherboard replacement. This would happen annually, sometimes twice a year. For a while, Apple replaced the motherboards for free, but every time this occured, it involved a week without a machine. Once it also involved a computer which came back with a completely new hard drive. All my data was gone. Clearly, Apple never got to the root cause of the problem, as it kept happening over and over again. Eventually, last summer, Apple said they wouldn't replace the motherboard for free anymore, and their price was in excess of $1000. I had no choice but to buy a new computer.

So I bought a Macbook. I knew it was going to be trouble, but I did it anyway. It was nice for while.

About a month ago I spilled some beer on it. Obviously, my fault. Not like my prior problem. However, these things do happen to laptops and laptops ought to be designed with that in mind.

Instantly, one of the design flaws of the MacBook that I knew would be a problem going in reared its ugly head: There is no way to remove the keyboard. Keyboards get nasty. They get dirty. They do not last as long as the rest of a laptop. Good laptops are designed to make them easy to replace. But not the macbook. Its keyboard is embedded into the system. Its hard to remove and hard to clean. You have a problem with it, you have to send the system in for service.

After 24 hours of drying out, the keyboard didn't work, and so I figured it was going in for service. Fortunately, after a few more days of drying out the keyboard miraculously recovered. Worked fine. Worked fine for a while, anyway. Eventually the mouse started sticking. This got worse and worse over time until last week, when the mouse simply stopped working altogether.

Having no simple way to take the computer apart, my theory was that dust had collected to stickiness in the mouse, and that if I removed the battery and literally sprayed some water on the trackpad and then gave it a few days to dry out, it would likely be fine. This was a stupid idea. I should have SSHed into the thing and cleared out my data first. But I didn't. Again, my fault, not Apple's.

The computer isn't fine. I must have shorted something against the clock battery (which is basically impossible to access) and fried a motherboard component. There is gunk in the computer which might be capacitor guts. I'm fucked.

The reason its hard to get inside the macbook is that it has 27 screws which must be removed. These screws are extremely small, ... [ Read More (0.4k in body) ]

Points for originality (sorta) but I don't like his antennas. I think he mixed too many designs in implementation. Also, I doubt that a 75-ohm VGA connector pair is the best match for RF at 50-ohm and 2.4GHz... VGA may see 500KHz for a single pair, but I doubt in excess of 5MHz tops. I'll have to look at the specs for HD15 and RS232 and see what the connectors can take. There's a reason the 13W3 uses three coax cables...

On the plus side, you can get a .5W amp from Hong Kong that does a/b/g :)

Homemade Laptop Wi-Fi Amplifier Review

If the Ninth Circuit does agree with Judge Pregerson that computer searches are "non routine," there's a decent chance that this case would be the first computer search and seizure case to get to the Supreme Court.

Sweet! I find the prospect of random laptop searches at borders to be offensive to the idea of a free society on many levels. Finally, someone has argued, and a court has accepted the arguement, that this isn't Constitutional. Now, we'll get to find out if the higher courts agree. Its on!

The Volokh Conspiracy - District Court Holds That Border Searches of Computers Require Reasonable Suspicion:

OH this pisses me off to no end...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- Microsoft Corp. Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates on Wednesday mocked a $100 laptop computer for developing countries being developed with the backing of rival Google Inc. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The $100 laptop project seeks to provide inexpensive computers to people in developing countries. The computers lack many features found on a typical personal computer, such as a hard disk and software.

"The last thing you want to do for a shared use computer is have it be something without a disk ... and with a tiny little screen," Gates said at the Microsoft Government Leaders Forum in suburban Washington.

"Hardware is a small part of the cost" of providing computing capabilities, he said, adding that the big costs come from network connectivity, applications and support.

Hmmm... are we a TAD jealous, Bill? Are we a little bitter that legions of children will grow up learning to compute on something OTHER than Windows?

Before his critique, Gates showed off a new "ultra-mobile computer" which runs Microsoft Windows on a seven-inch (17.78-centimeter) touch screen.

But of course! Competition. You just can’t sleep at night knowing you don’t control every aspect of people’s lives, (just 95% of us) can you? The open source community’s accusations that you are nothing short of a money-grubbing, power hungry BASTARD can’t be that far off mark, huh? Too bad this is an instance where you clearly have ZERO influence. Its eating away at you, isn’t it?

Those machines are expected to sell for between $599 and $999, Microsoft said at the product launch last week. (Full story)

OK, apparently Mr. Money Bags doesn't understand the concept of the $100 "One Laptop per Child" initiative. Or maybe he does and is frustrated because he knows he can’t compete. Maybe if he's going to piss and moan because his precious monopoly is in jeopardy, maybe he ought to, oh I donno... dip into his OWN pockets and make his own offering at a comparable price point - even if he has to loose money. Ya know - like he did with XBox??? The whole idea is to keep these things as inexpensive as possible, and here he is with his OWN offering that’s six to ten times more expensive? Hmmm… You willing to “eat” the losses Billy Boy? Put up or SHUT up.

"If you are going to go have people share the computer, get a broadband connection and have somebody there who can help support the user, geez, get a decent computer where you can actually read the text and you're not sitting there cranking the thing while you're trying to type," Gates said.

OK, maybe he IS just stupid sometimes. The reason they don't have a hard drive is to (A) conserve power (these things are going to get charged by a hand crank) and (B) t... [ Read More (0.1k in body) ]

USAToday - Bill Gates mocks MIT's $100 laptop

Decius wrote:

According to Slashdot the Washington Post published his hometown as the "location" caption for an odd image in the article. He lives in a very small town. Chances are he is going to prison.

I replied:

That's quite a slip-up. It will be interesting to see how the Ombudsman handles this one. (Email her at ombudsman@washpost.com.)

With an estimated male population of 1447 in 2004, and based on the US national age-sex pyramids provided by the Census Bureau, approximately 103 men in this town are between the ages of 20 and 24. If we assume a flat distribution across that range, there are roughly twenty 21-year-old men to consider.

If you look directly at the 2000 Census data for the town, there were 240 total (male and female) in the 15-19 group. Advance that group five to six years, adjust for population growth, account for the male-female ratio, and you come up with an estimate of 25 21-year-old men.

When you consider how many of those 25 dropped out of high school (74% of residents 25 and older graduated from high school), you're down to 5-7 suspects.

When you consider how many of those 5-7 still live with their parents, along with the percentage of 21-year-olds who haven't yet married, you're down to two or three guys. And how many of those families live in a brick rambler with a tan, weathered couch in the living room? And when you consider the obesity epidemic, along with the presumed low incidence of computer geekiness in rural middle America, it's hard to believe that more than one of those three guys is an unemployed geek with a new laptop and a "wiry frame."

RE: Invasion of the Computer Snatchers

The wasps are trained with sugar water by using the classical conditioning techniques made famous by Pavlov's dogs. Rains says the wasps are sensitive to a host of chemical odors, including 2,4-DNT, a volatile compound used in dynamite.

To do their work, five wasps — each a half-inch long — are placed in a plastic cylinder that is 15 inches tall. This "Wasp Hound," which costs roughly $100 per unit, has a vent in one end and a camera that connects to a laptop computer.

When the wasps pick up an odor they've been trained to detect they gather by the vent — a response that can be measured by the computer or actually seen by observers.

Lewis says the wasps, when exposed to some chemicals, "can detect as low as four parts per billion, which is an incredibly small amount."

I love low-tech like this!

USAToday - Scientists recruit wasps for war on terror

In what could hopefully (fingers crossed) become the next incident involving stolen footage of beautiful celebs baring all, Marc Antony (Mr. J-lo, not Mr. Cleopatra) has been the victim of a techjacking, with the New York Post reporting that the NYPD’s Computer Investigation and Technology Unit was recently dispatched to Antony’s pad to investigate the theft of his laptop. The reason that this story is more interesting than say, the recent theft of Kevin Costner’s laptop by a wedding employee, is because this thief is demanding a cool million bucks for the safe return of Antony’s lappie, leading people to hope and pray speculate that the notebook contains anything from “boudoir” shots of Ms. Lopez to full-on Pam/Fred/Paris-style shennanigans. As with all of the most important stories in consumer electronics, we’re gonna stay right on top of this one the whole way.

Marc Antony's laptop being held for $1 million ransom

"The rest of the cost [beyond $100] is there to support an absolutely obese, overweight, and unreliable operating system. If you get rid of that and start with a thin, tiny operating system you can do an awful lot," Negroponte says.

$100 Laptop

Good grief....

Open a Kensignton Laptop Lock with a roll of toilet paper.... [WMV]

Instructions to tap into an OnStar unit and take control of the GPS subsystem. Now you can disable the GPS and/or use it with your laptop (and mapping software) instead of (or in addition to) using it for OnStar.

Tap into OnStar