I came here to say almost the same thing. 24" widescreen at 1920x1200 gives me room for four 80x25 terminal windows open with a large readable font, or if I want to I can maximize one terminal window and see almost forever.
I've never thought of a widescreen as a smaller version of a 4.3 aspect screen. I think of it as a 4.3 screen with extra space on the sides.
Went from a 5 minute boot down to a boot time of only 60 seconds by optimizing my boot scripts and trimming the fat. Used bootchart to find the slow downs and optimized from there.
Of course this was on a ~15 year old 50mhz Sparcstation LX running Debian:)
Reminds me of the QBasic programming scene nearly ten years ago. We were all mostly little kids making little games and graphic demos when all of a sudden there was a huge flood on the message boards of people creating Shells with varying degrees of actual functionality and calling them Operating Systems. It was pretty funny how many arguments were started whenever someone posted thier new "Qbasic Operating System!". It was pretty funny, and some of the "OS"s created were actually pretty advanced windowing systems with a script langauge and pretty neat.
At that size and 17 lbs I'd expect a better keyboard.
Aside from the numeric keypad it looks like a standard crappy laptop keyboard. Why not go full size, and give the keys some more travel and feedback? Oh yes, I forgot; cost. I'm sure the primary users of this laptop will probably use it for DVDs and web surfing and hardly use the keyboard, making ergonomics a low priority for Acer.
I'm not against a 20" laptop. Desktop Replacements have thier place-- but a desktop replacement also needs to replace the nice keyboard on my desk as well as the fast computer and large display. This one does not fit the bill as a desktop replacement as far as I am concerned. I guess at 17 lbs you could always tote a nice fullsize external keyboard with you and not really tell the difference.
BTW, Raid 0?? Why not just let the two drives work as seperate drives? Scared the users would be confused by having a "C:" and a "D:" hard drive? Raid 0 == twice the likelyhood of failure.
I've always thought that Fedora, with it's rapid release cycle, was the distro you for you if you want the latest that linux has to offer. The bleeding edge if you will. Of course there are trade-offs. Before I settled on debian I tried a few distros, Fedora, Mandriva (Mandrake at the time), and Ubuntu.
I like Debian the most because of several things... Using Debian I feel like it's of higher quality. The long release schedule gives a lot of time to get everything working together well. It's not the most up to date, but I dont get weird problems from using it. Debian has a consistency-- It's that 'The Debian Way' thing. The way things are handled, configured, installed, etc seem to be more organized and consistant than other distros.
Using Fedora you get the latest of everything, and for me it's been stable and fast, but it doesn't seem to have the same consistency that I have grown to depend on in Debian.
I actively keep track of what Fedora is doing and I kind of root for it-- because I know the features it adopts will soon trickle down into other distros (and in a few years, maybe into Debian;)
I find the strength VB's IDE, the thing I wish other IDEs for other languages had most, is Intellisense. I like when I design my own classes and then use them that it shows me whats public to the class, helps me make sure I didn't leave something public that shouldn't be. I like it when I'm using an unfamiliar class/dll/control that it shows me what it's exposing. I like that if I mis-type the name of something, and the intellisense doesn't show up, then I know I made a typo somewhere.
Intellisense is good, but I've become too dependant on it. I also dont like to be locked to one platform anymore with closed source tools. Currently exploring python as an alternative. Everyone gives VB shit, but I think VB (classic VB) is like a powerful sports car, it is just all too often kiddies hop in and drive straight into a telephone pole. Most of the people who are capable of good things with VB either do so quietly and no one notices thier good work, or they do thier good work in other languages.
Running a basic KDE desktop on a Athlon XP 2400+ with 256mb ram and I've got KDE's classic theme with the eyecandy turned off... I'm just puzzled to why launching an xterm takes 3 or 4 seconds.
Running XFCE4 on a P3 1.1ghz with 256mb ram and launching an xterm takes no perceptable amount of time, it just pops up there.
I guess maybe KDE is chewing up so much memory that launching a new app requires some paging to make room.
At work I usually SSH into my box at home to read websites on Links so I can browse without leaving a trail in the company's logs. Plus if someone walks past, they dont know I'm browsing the net.
slashdot.org works ok in links, but slashdot.org/palm is preferred.
First time I ever *successfully* installed linux it was a Debain Sarge netboot install on a Sun SparcStation LX. It worked so smoothly it really made a strong impression on me and now Debian is my favorite linux distro. In my experience Debian netinst is about the most painless way to get linux on a computer.
I've only tried Fedora Core 3, Mandrake 10, and NetBSD so my experience is limited, but Debian has worked the best for me. I've installed it on new home-built PCs, a Thinkpad T23, and old old Thinkpad 701C, older desktop machines, and the previously mentioned SparcStation LX.
Debian is not the best distro for every niche, but it's flexible enough to work well in many different situations.
When I bought it I knew there would always be plenty of good free software for it because of the huge open source linux community that would be writing apps for it.
I got to try a Newton a few years ago and I was very impressed with how accurately it could figure out my bad handwriting. I've heard some people say the newton was not good at this, but the one I tried did a hell of a job.
Now there's an emulator for it I wont have to buy one off ebay just to play around with it some more.
Once while working in a service department at a computer store I had a dead 10 gig laptop drive. It was the kind of dead laptop drive that sounded like it was alternating between playing atari music and doing a car alarm sound. I took it apart to see if I could figure out how it was possible for it to make musical sounds. The platters were not spinning. I bumped middle of the platter motor with my finger and it started spinning, and the music stopped. I put the drive back together, formatted it, and used it in a test bench computer for a year before it started flaking out.
Amazed me that such delicate and precise equipment could be dicked around so much and still work at all.
I got to take a tour of the submarine my brother is on in the Navy. Looking around I saw several computer terminals around. I got to see the sonar terminals where my brother works and he said they ran Linux (I dont know if it was linux or some *nix). I only saw one computer with an NT password screen, it was used for communication and plotting I think. Other than that one the rest of the systems did not appear to be windows machines.
On the same idea, this would be useful for anyone who needs to bench test processors. This motherboard could replace 2 or three different motherboards.
I've always had this theory that if something like this was enabled in humans they'd turn into a giant cancer tumor like something from an old sci-fi movie.
"Gedit has about 30 user preferences spread across 5 tabs in a preferences window -- Notepad has about three."
Windows users dont use Notepad. They use Word. They use about 1% of what Word can do. Coming from retail computer sales I can tell you, a large portion of the customers I delt with thought all computers come with Windows and Word, that Windows and Word was the same thing, or thought Word (ala Microsoft Office 2003) was a newer version of Windows. Many of them thought a computer without Word was a useless computer.
The point is, Word is so ubiquitous that people think Word is the system. They think Windows is the system. Oh, there's Mac, too, but we dont use Macs at the office.
The complexity isn't the problem. People learn to live with windows, they can learn to live with Linux.
Another big thing I see holding Linux back is how many distributions there are. There is no defacto distro. Thats part of why we love Linux, no one-size-fits-all distribution, but it'll also hamper widespread acceptance among the masses of Windows sufferers and users.
I'm optimistic though. Things like Linspire and the bootable Linux Live CDs are big steps in the right direction.
The advantage to touch typing is you can watch the screen while you type. It's nice to be able to use a computer and type without constantly shifting focus between keyboard and computer screen.
While I'm no 'home row' touch typist, I do type by touch rather than looking at the keyboard (and I use all my fingers).
Though my first PC I built, when I was not aware of ECS's reputation, was a ECS K7S5A. It actually worked great. So naturally when my friend needed to build a PC a year later, the K7S5A Pro was my first choice.
It blew up in my face, literally. Exploding capacitor.
Slashdot Mirror
Whenever there is a post even vaguely related to keyboards I come to the comments for the Model M references.
I am never disappointed. /Model M owner
I came here to say almost the same thing. 24" widescreen at 1920x1200 gives me room for four 80x25 terminal windows open with a large readable font, or if I want to I can maximize one terminal window and see almost forever.
I've never thought of a widescreen as a smaller version of a 4.3 aspect screen. I think of it as a 4.3 screen with extra space on the sides.
...'RaceTrack' reminds me of 'TokenRing' I came here to say that.er, that should be "shave 4 minutes". and I even used the preview... d'oh
Went from a 5 minute boot down to a boot time of only 60 seconds by optimizing my boot scripts and trimming the fat. Used bootchart to find the slow downs and optimized from there.
:)
Of course this was on a ~15 year old 50mhz Sparcstation LX running Debian
No, we should call it component object model instead!
Reminds me of the QBasic programming scene nearly ten years ago. We were all mostly little kids making little games and graphic demos when all of a sudden there was a huge flood on the message boards of people creating Shells with varying degrees of actual functionality and calling them Operating Systems. It was pretty funny how many arguments were started whenever someone posted thier new "Qbasic Operating System!". It was pretty funny, and some of the "OS"s created were actually pretty advanced windowing systems with a script langauge and pretty neat.
You can see some examples of a "QB Operating System" here (not my site):
http://www.sepent.com/prog/basic/bguios/
At that size and 17 lbs I'd expect a better keyboard.
Aside from the numeric keypad it looks like a standard crappy laptop keyboard. Why not go full size, and give the keys some more travel and feedback? Oh yes, I forgot; cost. I'm sure the primary users of this laptop will probably use it for DVDs and web surfing and hardly use the keyboard, making ergonomics a low priority for Acer.
I'm not against a 20" laptop. Desktop Replacements have thier place-- but a desktop replacement also needs to replace the nice keyboard on my desk as well as the fast computer and large display. This one does not fit the bill as a desktop replacement as far as I am concerned. I guess at 17 lbs you could always tote a nice fullsize external keyboard with you and not really tell the difference.
BTW, Raid 0?? Why not just let the two drives work as seperate drives? Scared the users would be confused by having a "C:" and a "D:" hard drive? Raid 0 == twice the likelyhood of failure.
I've always thought that Fedora, with it's rapid release cycle, was the distro you for you if you want the latest that linux has to offer. The bleeding edge if you will. Of course there are trade-offs. Before I settled on debian I tried a few distros, Fedora, Mandriva (Mandrake at the time), and Ubuntu.
;)
I like Debian the most because of several things... Using Debian I feel like it's of higher quality. The long release schedule gives a lot of time to get everything working together well. It's not the most up to date, but I dont get weird problems from using it. Debian has a consistency-- It's that 'The Debian Way' thing. The way things are handled, configured, installed, etc seem to be more organized and consistant than other distros.
Using Fedora you get the latest of everything, and for me it's been stable and fast, but it doesn't seem to have the same consistency that I have grown to depend on in Debian.
I actively keep track of what Fedora is doing and I kind of root for it-- because I know the features it adopts will soon trickle down into other distros (and in a few years, maybe into Debian
I find the strength VB's IDE, the thing I wish other IDEs for other languages had most, is Intellisense. I like when I design my own classes and then use them that it shows me whats public to the class, helps me make sure I didn't leave something public that shouldn't be. I like it when I'm using an unfamiliar class/dll/control that it shows me what it's exposing. I like that if I mis-type the name of something, and the intellisense doesn't show up, then I know I made a typo somewhere.
Intellisense is good, but I've become too dependant on it. I also dont like to be locked to one platform anymore with closed source tools. Currently exploring python as an alternative. Everyone gives VB shit, but I think VB (classic VB) is like a powerful sports car, it is just all too often kiddies hop in and drive straight into a telephone pole. Most of the people who are capable of good things with VB either do so quietly and no one notices thier good work, or they do thier good work in other languages.
Answering a call on a flip phone: open the phone
Ending a call on a flip phone: close the phone
Running a basic KDE desktop on a Athlon XP 2400+ with 256mb ram and I've got KDE's classic theme with the eyecandy turned off... I'm just puzzled to why launching an xterm takes 3 or 4 seconds.
Running XFCE4 on a P3 1.1ghz with 256mb ram and launching an xterm takes no perceptable amount of time, it just pops up there.
I guess maybe KDE is chewing up so much memory that launching a new app requires some paging to make room.
At work I usually SSH into my box at home to read websites on Links so I can browse without leaving a trail in the company's logs. Plus if someone walks past, they dont know I'm browsing the net.
slashdot.org works ok in links, but slashdot.org/palm is preferred.
First time I ever *successfully* installed linux it was a Debain Sarge netboot install on a Sun SparcStation LX. It worked so smoothly it really made a strong impression on me and now Debian is my favorite linux distro. In my experience Debian netinst is about the most painless way to get linux on a computer.
I've only tried Fedora Core 3, Mandrake 10, and NetBSD so my experience is limited, but Debian has worked the best for me. I've installed it on new home-built PCs, a Thinkpad T23, and old old Thinkpad 701C, older desktop machines, and the previously mentioned SparcStation LX.
Debian is not the best distro for every niche, but it's flexible enough to work well in many different situations.
When I bought it I knew there would always be plenty of good free software for it because of the huge open source linux community that would be writing apps for it.
I got to try a Newton a few years ago and I was very impressed with how accurately it could figure out my bad handwriting. I've heard some people say the newton was not good at this, but the one I tried did a hell of a job.
Now there's an emulator for it I wont have to buy one off ebay just to play around with it some more.
Once while working in a service department at a computer store I had a dead 10 gig laptop drive. It was the kind of dead laptop drive that sounded like it was alternating between playing atari music and doing a car alarm sound. I took it apart to see if I could figure out how it was possible for it to make musical sounds. The platters were not spinning. I bumped middle of the platter motor with my finger and it started spinning, and the music stopped. I put the drive back together, formatted it, and used it in a test bench computer for a year before it started flaking out.
Amazed me that such delicate and precise equipment could be dicked around so much and still work at all.
I got to take a tour of the submarine my brother is on in the Navy. Looking around I saw several computer terminals around. I got to see the sonar terminals where my brother works and he said they ran Linux (I dont know if it was linux or some *nix). I only saw one computer with an NT password screen, it was used for communication and plotting I think. Other than that one the rest of the systems did not appear to be windows machines.
Was interesting.
On the same idea, this would be useful for anyone who needs to bench test processors. This motherboard could replace 2 or three different motherboards.
I've always had this theory that if something like this was enabled in humans they'd turn into a giant cancer tumor like something from an old sci-fi movie.
People who already own a console (or two) are also getting bored. They see the Gamecube is pretty cheap and pick one up.
I seriously think thats the situation with a lot of multiple console owners.
People want:
- to go to the store, pick up any game, put it in their computer, click next a few times in the installer, and play the game.
- to buy any MiniDV Camcorder from bestbuy, plug it into thier computer, install the software from CD, and start editing video.
- buy any Scanner at the store, plug it in.. blah blah blah
You know where I'm going with this.
Windows users dont use Notepad. They use Word. They use about 1% of what Word can do. Coming from retail computer sales I can tell you, a large portion of the customers I delt with thought all computers come with Windows and Word, that Windows and Word was the same thing, or thought Word (ala Microsoft Office 2003) was a newer version of Windows. Many of them thought a computer without Word was a useless computer.
The point is, Word is so ubiquitous that people think Word is the system. They think Windows is the system. Oh, there's Mac, too, but we dont use Macs at the office.
The complexity isn't the problem. People learn to live with windows, they can learn to live with Linux.
Another big thing I see holding Linux back is how many distributions there are. There is no defacto distro. Thats part of why we love Linux, no one-size-fits-all distribution, but it'll also hamper widespread acceptance among the masses of Windows sufferers and users.
I'm optimistic though. Things like Linspire and the bootable Linux Live CDs are big steps in the right direction.
This will probably end up modded off-topic, but...
1920x1280 resolution... 24" widescreen monitor perhaps? Maybe GDM-FW900, or maybe Mac Cinema LCD user?
The advantage to touch typing is you can watch the screen while you type. It's nice to be able to use a computer and type without constantly shifting focus between keyboard and computer screen.
While I'm no 'home row' touch typist, I do type by touch rather than looking at the keyboard (and I use all my fingers).
At work we call ECS "El Cheapo Shit"
Though my first PC I built, when I was not aware of ECS's reputation, was a ECS K7S5A. It actually worked great. So naturally when my friend needed to build a PC a year later, the K7S5A Pro was my first choice.
It blew up in my face, literally. Exploding capacitor.