Notebook with Huge 20 Inch Screen Reviewed

An anonymous reader writes "Trusted reviews has a look at the Acer Aspire 9800. This massive machine has a 20.1" screen, two 120GB hard drives in a RAID 0 array, super-multi DVD burner, analogue and digital TV tuners and an Intel Core Duo dual core CPU. And at over 17lb you can even use it for weight training!"

Comments

lb?

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

And at over 17lb you can even use it for weight training

Thats 7.7kgs for those of us not still using British imperial measurements ;-)

Re:lb?

[nizo]

I just wondered, why are pounds written as "lbs"? I found the answer here

[Q] From Andrea: "Why are pounds, when used as a weight, abbreviated lbs?"

[A] The origin is in the Latin word libra, which could mean both balance scales (hence the symbol for the astrological sign Libra, which was named after a constellation that was thought to resemble scales) and also a pound weight, for which the full expression was libra pondo, the second word being the origin of our pound.

Who says Slashdot isn't educational???

Re:lb?

[zenhkim]

True -- unless you're measuring weight for certain kinds of materials. This can be illustrated by a riddle that sounds an awful lot like a trick question:

"Which weighs more -- a pound of feathers or a pound of gold?"

The obvious answer would be "Neither!" since logically a pound of x should be exactly as heavy as a pound of y. Unfortunately, there are two different (and maddeningly incompatible) standards for measuring a pound: troy and avoirdupois.

A troy pound is defined as weighing twelve ounces and (historically) is used almost exclusively for precious metals, whereas an avoirdupois pound has sixteen ounces and is used for nearly everything else. Based on this, the pound of feathers weighs *more* than the pound of gold!

As if that weren't bad enough, the troy ounce is *slightly heavier* than the avoirdupois ounce -- therefore an ounce of feathers weighs less than an ounce of gold! Are we sufficiently confused yet??

http://www.unc.edu/~rowlett/units/custom.html

No wonder people dumped that Old English system for metric....

Re:slugs

[tehshen]

4.64371564×10^27 atomic mass units, for the physicists