Thinkpads are now built by the Chinese government.

Enjoy.

IBM, the prototypical American multinational, now recognizes that its own future lies even farther up the economic ladder, in technology services and consulting, in software and in the larger computers that power corporate networks and the Internet.

A Bridge Between Companies and Cultures

Newton fans.

The Old New Thing

k wrote:
] [ What i didn't know is that the platters were plastic (glass?).
] In all the harddrives i've ever opened, they were metal,
] presumably aluminum. -k]

The migration to glass platters began in the last decade. Further explanation is at

http://www.storagereview.com/guide2000/ref/hdd/op/mediaMaterials.html

Briefly:

As technology advances, the gap between the heads and the platter is decreasing, and the speed that the platters spin at is increasing, creating more demands on the platter material itself. Uneven platter surfaces on hard disks running at faster speeds with heads closer to the surface are more apt to lead to head crashes. For this reason many drive makers began several years ago to look at alternatives to aluminum, such as glass, glass composites, and magnesium alloys.

It now is looking increasingly likely that glass and composites made with glass will be the next standard for the platter substrate. IBM has been shipping drives with glass platters for several years ...

Hard Disk Drive Platters are Glass

Using a Controlled loss virtual link (CLVL) abstraction to bound the loss rate observed by a traffic aggregate, OverQoS can provide a variety of services including: (a) smoothing packet losses; (b) prioritizing packets within an aggregate; (c) statistical loss and bandwidth guarantees.

OverQoS: An Overlay based Architecture for Enhancing Internet QoS