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Dell Designing Developer Oriented Laptop
jones_supa writes "Barton George, director of marketing for Dell's Web vertical reveals information about 'Project Sputnik', a laptop tailored for developer needs in web companies. 'We want to find ways to make the developer experience as powerful and simple as possible. And what better way to do that than beginning with a laptop that is both highly mobile and extremely stylish, running the 12.04 LTS release of Ubuntu Linux,' George ponders. He also gives a quick list of packages that the default installation could include. The machine will base on the XPS13, assessing a couple of its main hardware deficiencies along the way."
According to the article, this is a "6 month project to investigate an Ubuntu laptop. If successful, we have big plans for the effort." It's unclear how closely they are working with upstream, but there's mention of Canonical as a commercial partner so this may mean Dell is working to ensure some of their hardware Just Works (tm) with Ubuntu. The software side is so far just a customized install with developer tools preinstalled. Ars remains skeptical about Dell's strategy for GNU/Linux support, which may be warranted given their track record.
Absolutely true. I cannot believe that Apple is the only company still making a 1200 vertical resolution screen. It's annoying having to spend $2700 on the only decent laptop that still exists.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
What does resolution have to do with font size?
As the pixel density increases, the font size in physical pixels has to increase proportionally . But a lot of Windows applications (and, I assume, Linux applications) have broken layout if you run them at any DPI other than 96.
The new iPad has a 9" screen at 2048x1536
As with the iPhone 4 compared to the 3GS, the new iPad's screen is exactly twice as dense in each direction as the iPad 2's. This allows the operating system to more easily compensate for DPI-unaware applications. The Windows platform hasn't had such a jump.