Caltrops - Motherfucking News





	[quote name="jeep"][quote name="Fussbett"]Ahhh! They've alerady identified the major components! Including the UltraNav! We're doomed! [/quote] IBM has been trying to crack the chinese market for a while. They've complained publicly that every time they set up a factory, a chinese company opens a factory across the street making identical equipment. So bad news for Lou: they already have our intellectual property, they don't consider it ours, and IBM is just letting them do what they were doing anyway, but now it's legal-like internationally. Those Thinkpads, which the dim-witted Director of our cancer research group so inadequately describes as 'stinkpads', were engineered by the Japanese. IBM opened a lab in Japan specifically to develop a new laptop and the first Thinkpad, which was a tablet PC, was the result. We have about 40 of the various models and with the exception of the one RAID-driven sound-modem in the 770s I love every nigh-indestructible magnesium-cased one of them. I even used to play beardy-linux guy for them when they were first exploring the possibility of using linux on IBM hardware - I had to help them install redhat and suse on them back during the redhat 4 days, that team developed all of the Euro-only linux workstations IBM makes today. So IBM lets them take over the Thinkpads and Aptivas and Netvistas, then uses that as leverage for their mid-level linux/lotus/db2 servers to get into the chinese business market. Those of you not in IT or some related field would not believe what IBM is doing outside of manufacturing computers, how much they're making at it, and how much they stand to make in the future. Those PCs were practically loss leaders for IBM's "real" business ventures. Right now they're so busy filling orders for Lotus and positioning their cluster and miniframe tech at the center of every major medical research project in the US I'm sure they don't give a shit who makes the desktops anymore. For me it's a shame because it means I've got about 18 months left to stock up on Thinkpads before the inevitable brand implosion. We're building our own PCs now anyway, I can get IBM-quality desktop hardware at about 1/5th the price buying it in batches from thenerds.net. /jeep/ ...can't believe he missed this thread.[/quote]