OK, no optical drive, but the Thinkpad s30 was pretty close, and that was in 2000 or 2001. If it just had the capability to take more memory I'd still be using it every day.
Palm also shot themselves repeatedly in the foot by changing the docks & cable connectors with every new model, obsoleting the investment loyal users had made in accessories. I was pleased to hear that phone manufacturers were planning on standardising, until I heard that they were "standardising" on a new standard! Apparently mini-USB is not small enough, we need femto-USB or something. I still don't understand why phones don't all have a) USB sockets for charging & syncing and b) headphone sockets for, you know, headphones. It's not like they make their profits on the chargers, surely? Apple abandoned ADB in the end; perhaps they've learnt this lesson.
Back sort of on topic, I use an IBM Spacesaver II keyboard, which
doesn't have a numeric keypad, so I get to have a (generic laser scroll wheel) mouse right by the right side of it, instead of waaaaaay over -----> there to the right
has a trackpoint nipple in the middle
has three mouse buttons
a trackpad (don't use this very much) and
a couple of USB ports on the back
working (teeny-tiny) volume & mute keys
a rather swanky travel case, which I've never used, and don't expect to
It could only be better if it had a powered USB2 hub, rather than an unpowered USB1. And maybe if it had more of a clicky Model M feel, while I'm dreaming. The most important thing though is that I don't have to move my hands at all for most point-to-focus type stuff (I use the trackpoint), and the mouse is proper handy for when I do want to use it. I don't do enough typing in of numbers to miss the numeric keypad, but just in case I bought a USB one that I can stick in if I want it in the future.
True. But that non-native windowing system does come with the operating system...
It's not a showstopper; I bought a Macbook despite its single unfeasibly large button. It still irritates me though -- I don't see why it can't at least do the Mighty Mouse thing of having a left and a right side. Having lost the religious war with the mice, I don't see why there's any point in continuing the same dumb game with the trackpads.
Hey, a thought: divide it into six chunks, and it could be configured to do everything: 1 big button, left/right buttons and left/middle/right buttons.
I don't see why there can't be three physical buttons on the Apple trackpad, all mapped to the same "left click" action by default. Then users would have the choice. As a previous poster said, the chords to use the "missing buttons" in X applications are revolting.
If you read the source to that page you can see the URL for the Z5 file, which you can then download, and play with the interpreter of your choice. See The Interactive Fiction Archive for one of those. If you enjoyed the HHGTTG you may also be interested in the CD "The Masterpieces of Infocom" -- I got mine from lacegem I think. There's loads of good stuff in ifarchive as well.
I have an IBM i Series s30 which regularly used to get 5 hours or so when the battery was new, even longer with the long-life battery (I used it for whole working days doing network analysis at a client site). The quoted battery life is 6 hours for the "standard" and 10 for the "extended" battery.
It does this partly due to its design: a small screen (hence low power consumption), no CD- or DVD-drive, a relatively low-powered 600MHz CPU; and partly due to the aggressive power-management I set up, eg hdparm to spin down the hard drive, noatime on the filesystems, low screen brightness.
It still didn't have decent ACPI support though, last time I checked, so suspend doesn't work. This is highly irritating. I must get round to trying a recent 2.6 some time...
If you don't like things being messy in/usr/local/ try stow -- it helps you maintain a tree of symlinks to individual package trees. So/usr/local/bin would be filled with symlinks pointing to/usr/local/stow/package-0.9/bin/program and so on. You can add a single directory to your PATH and run the "default" versions of things, or specify explicitly a particular version.
It is also handy for keeping old versions around in case you need to roll back upgrades.
It's kind of hard to describe, the link above should make things clearer. Or just try it.
bzip2 seems to use 900k blocks (see refet seq), so even if it does this kind of thing I'm not sure that in the case of rsyncing updates to kernel source code it is going to be very useful. I guess you have to make the trade-off between the smaller.bz2 files vs larger but rsyncable.gz files.
I thought that recent gzip compressed files were "rsyncable", in that the blocks they consist of are designed to remain as invariant as possible given the slight differences in content of the files. See, for example, this patch.
I remain to be convinced that anyone has actually had this working.
I spent ages working with various combinations of dhcpd, tftpd, Solaris and Linux in a vain attempt to boot my laptop off the network.
In the end I cracked and bought a floppy drive for it.
Could anyone that has a working config publish it, together with the version numbers and config files of all the servers installed? All the vendor-specific messing in the DNS, ick.
I bought an IBM Thinkpad i series s30 that was the nearest approximation I could find to your spec. It's got a 700MHz CPU and a physically small screen. The CPU is overpowered, which is a shame, but with the larger battery I get easily a full working day. Small snags are that all the docs are in Japanese (eg the maintenance manual, web pages...), and that since it's ACPI based power management under Linux is poor. More details here. Expensive, but it is a seriously nice little piece of kit.
I just bought a Rose MiniVista KVM switch from KVMswitch direct. It arrived next day, works like a charm, but I'm not running high resolution video over it. Nice touches: it also switches audio, and is controllable from the keyboard. It is very tiny, but that's outweighed to an extent by the hydra of fairly inflexible cables sprouting from it -- I plan on Velcro-ing it to the underneath of the desk.
EuroPC (based in the UK) sold me a firewall for GBP 70 + VAT (+ GBP 15 postage); apart from needing a keyboard to boot (I use a KVM switch) it's been fine. They seem to have quite a high throughput of stuff, so it's worth checking back every now & then to see what they have.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, no optical drive, but the Thinkpad s30 was pretty close, and that was in 2000 or 2001. If it just had the capability to take more memory I'd still be using it every day.
Viruses.
Palm also shot themselves repeatedly in the foot by changing the docks & cable connectors with every new model, obsoleting the investment loyal users had made in accessories. I was pleased to hear that phone manufacturers were planning on standardising, until I heard that they were "standardising" on a new standard! Apparently mini-USB is not small enough, we need femto-USB or something. I still don't understand why phones don't all have a) USB sockets for charging & syncing and b) headphone sockets for, you know, headphones. It's not like they make their profits on the chargers, surely? Apple abandoned ADB in the end; perhaps they've learnt this lesson.
Likewise with my HP16C...
Back sort of on topic, I use an IBM Spacesaver II keyboard, which
It could only be better if it had a powered USB2 hub, rather than an unpowered USB1. And maybe if it had more of a clicky Model M feel, while I'm dreaming. The most important thing though is that I don't have to move my hands at all for most point-to-focus type stuff (I use the trackpoint), and the mouse is proper handy for when I do want to use it. I don't do enough typing in of numbers to miss the numeric keypad, but just in case I bought a USB one that I can stick in if I want it in the future.
True. But that non-native windowing system does come with the operating system...
It's not a showstopper; I bought a Macbook despite its single unfeasibly large button. It still irritates me though -- I don't see why it can't at least do the Mighty Mouse thing of having a left and a right side. Having lost the religious war with the mice, I don't see why there's any point in continuing the same dumb game with the trackpads.
Hey, a thought: divide it into six chunks, and it could be configured to do everything: 1 big button, left/right buttons and left/middle/right buttons.
Thinkpads have always had at least three buttons.
I don't see why there can't be three physical buttons on the Apple trackpad, all mapped to the same "left click" action by default. Then users would have the choice. As a previous poster said, the chords to use the "missing buttons" in X applications are revolting.
sometimes "copy and pasted" code might be acceptable -- eg when it's written by code generation tools...
I didn't realise early slashdot registration conferred priviliges of any sort -- fwiw I reluctanctly use vi
If you read the source to that page you can see the URL for the Z5 file, which you can then download, and play with the interpreter of your choice. See The Interactive Fiction Archive for one of those. If you enjoyed the HHGTTG you may also be interested in the CD "The Masterpieces of Infocom" -- I got mine from lacegem I think. There's loads of good stuff in ifarchive as well.
I have an IBM i Series s30 which regularly used to get 5 hours or so when the battery was new, even longer with the long-life battery (I used it for whole working days doing network analysis at a client site). The quoted battery life is 6 hours for the "standard" and 10 for the "extended" battery.
It does this partly due to its design: a small screen (hence low power consumption), no CD- or DVD-drive, a relatively low-powered 600MHz CPU; and partly due to the aggressive power-management I set up, eg hdparm to spin down the hard drive, noatime on the filesystems, low screen brightness.
It still didn't have decent ACPI support though, last time I checked, so suspend doesn't work. This is highly irritating. I must get round to trying a recent 2.6 some time...
I think you're missing the comment where I said they had an "all time great logo"
Sorry for replying to myself here -- SQL fairy won't help with the different outer join syntax, for the moment it's only DDL.
For transmogrifying dialects of SQL, see http://sqlfairy.sf.net/ (plus bonus visualisation tools, and an all time great logo to boot)
SystemStarter CVS
It is also handy for keeping old versions around in case you need to roll back upgrades.
It's kind of hard to describe, the link above should make things clearer. Or just try it.
bzip2 seems to use 900k blocks (see ref et seq), so even if it does this kind of thing I'm not sure that in the case of rsyncing updates to kernel source code it is going to be very useful. I guess you have to make the trade-off between the smaller .bz2 files vs larger but rsyncable .gz files.
I thought that recent gzip compressed files were "rsyncable", in that the blocks they consist of are designed to remain as invariant as possible given the slight differences in content of the files. See, for example, this patch.
the humanscale freedom chair is fantastic
A wireless earpiece for cellphones, eh? What a good idea!
I bought a s30 off these guys; no complaints at all.
I remain to be convinced that anyone has actually had this working.
I spent ages working with various combinations of dhcpd, tftpd, Solaris and Linux in a vain attempt to boot my laptop off the network.
In the end I cracked and bought a floppy drive for it.
Could anyone that has a working config publish it, together with the version numbers and config files of all the servers installed? All the vendor-specific messing in the DNS, ick.
I bought an IBM Thinkpad i series s30 that was the nearest approximation I could find to your spec. It's got a 700MHz CPU and a physically small screen. The CPU is overpowered, which is a shame, but with the larger battery I get easily a full working day. Small snags are that all the docs are in Japanese (eg the maintenance manual, web pages ...), and that since it's ACPI based power management under Linux is poor. More details here. Expensive, but it is a seriously nice little piece of kit.
I just bought a Rose MiniVista KVM switch from KVMswitch direct. It arrived next day, works like a charm, but I'm not running high resolution video over it. Nice touches: it also switches audio, and is controllable from the keyboard. It is very tiny, but that's outweighed to an extent by the hydra of fairly inflexible cables sprouting from it -- I plan on Velcro-ing it to the underneath of the desk.
EuroPC (based in the UK) sold me a firewall for GBP 70 + VAT (+ GBP 15 postage); apart from needing a keyboard to boot (I use a KVM switch) it's been fine. They seem to have quite a high throughput of stuff, so it's worth checking back every now & then to see what they have.