Get a better one

Last January, coming home from my Boston trip, I was sitting in Chicago O’Hare aiport, desperately searching for free wifi, when I looked at my kernel log messages. But, what to my frustrated eyes should appear, than another example of the humor of Open Source developers, specifically, the developers of the NetworkManager framework:

NetworkManager: <WARN> request_and_convert_scan_results(): card took too much time scanning. Get a better one.

Granted, this warning is probably warranted. I was using a 802.11b card that is several years old, plus the calls are going through NDIS Wrapper. It was time to get a new laptop. The one was using was a Dell Inspiron 4000: PIII-800, 384MB of RAM, no built LAN or WiFi.