[Chicago-talk] laptop, which brand is good.

Brad Doty bdoty at efs-us.com
Tue Dec 6 14:44:25 PST 2005


Mail order can work better for selection or customization.  But I have
to say for support, nothing in my experience has beaten the old Best Buy
PSP repair/replacement warranty.  Wherever you buy, you should get
something like that to protect your investment.  I know a computer's a
wasting asset, but laptops tend to physically waste away before their
value does.  I never bought such a thing with mail order or other
stores, they might be fine also.  

I'm a guy who would never consider buying an extended warranty on a car
or appliance, but I'm very glad I did at Best Buy, and I continue to do
so.

There's no better feeling when your laptop screen wears out after a year
or two (or you drop your cell phone on the train and there's no visible
damage) than when they replace it with the latest equipment for free.  

It's pricey, it takes a week or more, you have to keep your receipt, and
one time they couldn't find it in the company-wide database so I had to
go to the store where I got the PC (not my local branch because of, you
guessed it, lack of selection), but it beats spending another grand or
two, and I've never failed to use one since I started buying them with
my first cell phone.

Brad Doty
Error Free Software
braddoty at yahoo.com

-----Original Message-----
------------------------------

Message: 3
Date: Tue, 06 Dec 2005 12:10:38 -0500
From: Steven Lembark <lembark at wrkhors.com>
Subject: Re: [Chicago-talk] laptop, which brand is good.
To: "Chicago.pm chatter" <chicago-talk at pm.org>
Message-ID: <4FAF8199934ADBC3657A466B at duke.wrkhors.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii



-- Imran Javaid <ijavaid at usa.net>

> When it comes to brands, there are several decent (mail-order) brands
to
> choose from (Dell, IBM, Panasonic). Mail-order works better. You get
> better selection through customization. I would stay away from brick
and
> mortar stores since those are consumer oriented mostly. 

As a linux user, from now on I'll avoid Dell like the 
Plague. As they've grown, Dell has followed the same
path as Compaq: designing mostly-custom hardware that
doesn't have out-of-the-box support from anyone but 
themselves. As the hardware gets more proprietary even
people I know running windows have probelms with it.

> When connecting to a linux desktop, use Cygwin (and Cygwin-X). Its not
too
> hard to get it working if you follow the instructions. You can run
your
> X-windows apps from your laptop easily with that.

Apple makes excellent hardware -- even better if you
don't plan to run linux on it :-) I picked up a Dell 
I8600 for the screen but for a "portable desktop" 
Apple has larger, cleaner screens with rather nice
keyboards availble for decent prices these days.

If you are using the thing on-site for a multi-month
gig (what I use my machine for) then size is less of 
an issue than if you haul it to work every day (or
home on the plane every week). At that point I'd go
for the best-looking screen and cleanest-feeling 
keyboard/pointer: they are what you really use.


-- 
Steven Lembark                                       85-09 90th Street
Workhorse Computing                                Woodhaven, NY 11421
lembark at wrkhors.com                                     1 888 359 3508


------------------------------

Message: 4
Date: Tue, 6 Dec 2005 09:37:15 -0800 (PST)
From: tiger peng <tigerpeng2001 at yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: [Chicago-talk] laptop, which brand is good.
To: "Chicago.pm chatter" <chicago-talk at pm.org>
Message-ID: <20051206173715.20309.qmail at web54713.mail.yahoo.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1

Thanks everyone for the information.

I planed to buy a thinkpad, as I used it for a long
time. However, the price they list online just
confused me. I called the salesman, and got a
different price. I really fell uncomfortable to do the
deal with them.

I went to CDW
http://www.cdw.com/webcontent/land/page/q4savenow.asp;
and chose "Acer TM4062WLMi", I hope it is a right
choice.

Ge


--- Steven Lembark <lembark at wrkhors.com> wrote:

> 
> 
> -- Imran Javaid <ijavaid at usa.net>
> 
> > When it comes to brands, there are several decent
> (mail-order) brands to
> > choose from (Dell, IBM, Panasonic). Mail-order
> works better. You get
> > better selection through customization. I would
> stay away from brick and
> > mortar stores since those are consumer oriented
> mostly. 
> 
> As a linux user, from now on I'll avoid Dell like
> the 
> Plague. As they've grown, Dell has followed the same
> path as Compaq: designing mostly-custom hardware
> that
> doesn't have out-of-the-box support from anyone but 
> themselves. As the hardware gets more proprietary
> even
> people I know running windows have probelms with it.
> 
> > When connecting to a linux desktop, use Cygwin
> (and Cygwin-X). Its not too
> > hard to get it working if you follow the
> instructions. You can run your
> > X-windows apps from your laptop easily with that.
> 
> Apple makes excellent hardware -- even better if you
> don't plan to run linux on it :-) I picked up a Dell
> 
> I8600 for the screen but for a "portable desktop" 
> Apple has larger, cleaner screens with rather nice
> keyboards availble for decent prices these days.
> 
> If you are using the thing on-site for a multi-month
> gig (what I use my machine for) then size is less of
> 
> an issue than if you haul it to work every day (or
> home on the plane every week). At that point I'd go
> for the best-looking screen and cleanest-feeling 
> keyboard/pointer: they are what you really use.
> 
> 
> -- 
> Steven Lembark                                      
> 85-09 90th Street
> Workhorse Computing                               
> Woodhaven, NY 11421
> lembark at wrkhors.com                                 
>    1 888 359 3508
> _______________________________________________
> Chicago-talk mailing list
> Chicago-talk at pm.org
> http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/chicago-talk
> 



------------------------------

Message: 5
Date: Tue, 6 Dec 2005 12:42:14 -0600
From: Andy_Bach at wiwb.uscourts.gov
Subject: [Chicago-talk] "Higher Order Perl" example question (page
	191)
To: "PM, Chicago" <chicago-talk at mail.pm.org>
Cc: mjd-perl-hop at plover.com
Message-ID:
	
<OFC8015757.38897EB9-ON862570CF.00654BCD-862570CF.0066B9C6 at uscmail.uscou
rts.gov>
	
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII"

Hey folks,

Sent this to MJD but he's off in London so ... in the iterator/web
spider 
section, he building up various web page 'walking' iterators.
traverse() 
returns an "Iterator" . Originally the IT creator just took a list of 
URLs, which it put in a queue.  'kicking' (his term for doing a
'NEXTVAL' 
on an iterator) the iterator too the first URL off the queue, pushed any

URLs it contained (if it is of content-type text/html) on the queue and 
returned the URL. 

He then adds a callback as the first param to the traverse() IT
generator. 
 This is to let the URL only return 'interesting' (passed by the
callback 
sub) URLs something like:
my $top = 'http://perl.plover.com/';
my $interesting = sub { grep /^\Q$top/o, @_ };

and so you'd create a new IT by:
my $urls = traverse($interesting, $top);

The change to the traverse() sub is:
sub traverse {
  my $interesting_links  = sub { @_ };
  $interesting_links = shift if ref $_[0] eq 'CODE';
....
   push @queue, $interesting_links->(get_links($url, $html));
## used to be
# push @queue, (get_links($url, $html);

so, if I *don't* pass a sub ref as the first param, $interesting_links 
will be a ref to a sub of the list of URLs? How is that going to work w/

get_links()?

... ahh, that's wrong. $interesting_links will be a ref to a sub that 
returns its own '@_', that is, the URLs returned by get_links() if
there's 
no passed-in call back.  I was confused on when that @_ was going to be 
... used? invoked? something. 

Never mind ;->  <whew> it is a very interesting book.  Its a bit (at
page 
191) all over the place, but all the places are quite useful and 
informative, so far.  Not easy, by any means, this is not the first 
example I've had got back over and try and figure out how what he says
has 
happened actually got implemented.  That is probably a good thing.


a

Andy Bach, Sys. Mangler
Internet: andy_bach at wiwb.uscourts.gov 
VOICE: (608) 261-5738  FAX 264-5932

"yeah, but does it have a cute little puppy that wags it's tail
 and scampers around on the screen?"
BillG on linux


------------------------------

Message: 6
Date: Tue, 6 Dec 2005 13:50:01 -0600
From: Andy Lester <andy at petdance.com>
Subject: [Chicago-talk] MJD replies...
To: chicago-talk at mail.pm.org, Andy_Bach at wiwb.uscourts.gov
Message-ID: <20051206195001.GA30175 at petdance.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii

Subject: Re: HOP page 191 
Date: Tue, 06 Dec 2005 13:47:49 -0500
From: Mark Jason Dominus <mjd at plover.com>


> Just trying to figure this out:
> sub traverse {
>   my $interesting_links  = sub { @_ };
>   $interesting_links = shift if ref $_[0] eq 'CODE';
> ....
>    push @queue, $interesting_links->(get_links($url, $html));
> 
> so, if I *don't* pass a sub ref as the first param, $interesting links

> will be a ref to a sub of the list of URLs? How is that going to work
w/ 
> get_links?

$interesting_links is a function that gets a bunch of URLs and returns
only the ones that are interesting.  By default, it returns
everything.

If you pass a function as the first argument to traverse(), the default
$interesting_links function is replaced with the argument function.

The replacement function should still be prepared to accept a list of
URLs and to return the ones that are interesting.

get_links() returns a list of URLs, which are passed to the
interesting_links function.  The default interesting_links function
returns all the URLs it was passed.




------- End of Forwarded Message


----- End forwarded message -----

-- 
Andy Lester => andy at petdance.com => www.petdance.com => AIM:petdance


------------------------------

_______________________________________________
Chicago-talk mailing list
Chicago-talk at pm.org
http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/chicago-talk

End of Chicago-talk Digest, Vol 29, Issue 7
*******************************************


More information about the Chicago-talk mailing list