Re: When I bought my 'mobile' workstation 4 years ago...

I'm sitting here typing this on my work-provided W510.. Oh wait, no I'm not, because it is a hugely disappointing piece of junk that only has a 1600x900 resolution (which is as good as you'll get on a W5*0 unless you pay extra for the "full HD" screen option, which my employer didn't) - so I'll only use it when I really have to. This replaced a T61p that - while physically smaller - supported 1920x1200 and had a much more useful screen ratio. Still, I guess I was lucky - the "base" model comes with a 1366x768 display, which for a 15.7" display in a "mobile workstation" (i.e. big, heavy and expensive) class of notebook is criminal. Looking at the Lenovo site, the current crop of T series is no better. Says a lot about the way Lenovo has gone really.

However, I think the experience of Apple shows that there is still a lot of potential profit in personal computing hardware if you produce a good product and avoid the commoditised end of the market, as long as you do it right. You might say then that IBM's decision to sell Lenovo was a mistake, but on the other hand I'm not sure that IBM was or would be capable of claiming a chunk of the high end high margin market. It remains to be seen if Lenovo as a standalone can do it, but of they do want to they need to produce some better hardware than the W & T series.

Re: Already had my close call with the cloud

Agree with a lot of the comments on here.

I've recently taken to using another approach to the cloud for backing up my data. I have a Linux micro image running in the Amazon EC2 cloud with a substantial EBS volume attached (interestingly EBS is still cheaper than S3 for Amazon data storage). I rsync my music, photos and incremental dumps from my FreeBSD home server daily. A Synology NAS acts as my main backup/archive/filestore and most of the data on this is either archived to blu ray or replicated to EC2 via the above rsync process. This way I am in control about how my cloudy data is stored/used as I administer the server, and while I am dependent on Amazon continuing to provide the platform, this is a backup data store only.

Finally, I keep copies of portions of this on my laptop and desktop. I use Unison File Synchroniser to keep these in sync. I can't recommend Unison enough for anyone who works on documents from multiple locations and doesn't want to rely on manual copying or services like dropbox. It means that I can easily switch from working on desktop to laptop to go on the road, and also ensure that I have a backup of other key files while I'm at it.

@Zett Jukassa

I'm aware of that the parsec is a measure of distance - I was attempting to have a poke at Lucas's own failure to understand this fact. Hence the deliberate confusion of distance and time in my post. I thought it was amusing (albeit slightly corny, hence the icon I chose), but I guess a joke's not funny if you need to explain it :)

I for one don't buy for a second the post hoc explanations about the Kessel Run claim - I think that Lucas just got it wrong.

"I played with a mate's Lego Star Wars Millenium Falcon the other week: it's massive and belongs on this list though it is £340+ and takes aeons to construct."

- Surely you mean it takes *parsecs* to construct?