

A Programmer's Plea to Laptop Makers - kpanghmc
http://www.kevinwilliampang.com/post/A-Programmers-Plea-to-Laptop-Makers.aspx

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rbanffy
I want an OMAP-based laptop that can run off batteries for 24+ hours on a
single charge, that runs Linux, emacs and Django on a decent, 800+ line
screen.

The way it is, the article is a series of complaints of a Visual Studio user
who, appearently, can't rearange the windows in its own environment. Not
everyone uses Visual Studio and most of those who use should be able to set up
their environment comfortably.

I am fine with a widescreen laptop: I just use the rest of the screen for
things other than source-code. For me, any landscape screen is less than
perfect. I would much rather use a portrait monitor, but a laptop with a
portrait display is less than practical.

I never used a square screen... Anyone willing to sell an NCD-16 1024x1024 X
terminal?

~~~
blasdel
I've been hungering for an OMAP laptop too, the TouchBook is quite clever and
should be out soon: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=500365>

For the handheld / pocket form-factor there's <http://openpandora.org/>

~~~
rbanffy
The problem is the screen. 600x1024 is the bare minimum. I use an Acer Aspire
One, which is a great netbook, very responsive, runs everything I throw at it
at decent, if not breathtaking, speeds, but the screen is the weakest point.
When on a desk, I always hook it up to a desktop monitor.

Unfortunately, the Intel GMA driver is buggy
(<https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/302227>). Annoying but functional.

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smanek
He wants a 10K RPM HDD and a laptop that stays cool ... Those two seem
mutually exclusive to me. It takes a lot of energy to spin platters that fast,
and it all gets turned into heat in the end. MLC SSDs are pretty cheap these
days - if you really do that much dev work on your laptop, invest a few
hundred dollars in a good one.

~~~
gdee
>It takes a lot of energy to spin platters that fast, and it all gets turned
into heat in the end.

Wrong. Just the wasted energy turns to heat. Wasted by means of
mechanical/electric friction. The usefully used (to put it this way) get's
transformed in kinetic energy (platter rotation)(most), other electrical
energy (transformers) and more.

~~~
smanek
Almost all the energy a computer takes in (over 99%) is 'wasted' as heat.

Talk to anyone who has ever run a datacenter. The heat output of a machine is
exactly equal to the amount of energy consumed. Maybe a watt or two leaves the
room as electrical energy on a network cable, as sound energy, or as EM
radiation.

Where else does the energy go?

Look at this as a freshmen year physics thermodynamics problem. Your system of
interest is the computer case. It has 500 Watts coming in. It has 0.5 watts
leaving as EM radiation, 0.5 watts leaving as sound (i.e., vibrations in the
air), and 1 Watt leaving on wires connected to it. The other 498 Watts are
necessarily heat.

~~~
gdee
Oh common. I objected to you saying that _all_ energy drawn gets transformed
to heat. That's patently false, unless the system you're studying has either
efficiency 0% or is indeed a heater of efficiency 100%. Anything in between
contradicts what you said. In the specific case I've objected to is even
easier to see the problem. The HDD platters spin. That's work done. Energy
transformation from electric to kinetic. Whether its quantity is bigger or
smaller than that that gets transformed to thermal energy is a matter of
efficiency. Otherwise the kinetic one would be free and Perendev and Bedini
would be inclined to post here.

~~~
tome
I appreciate that you've taken the literal interpretation of the world "all",
but if you're going to be pedantic (which isn't very helpful or interesting in
any case) at least be correct, please.

Eventually all the kinetic energy in the spinning platters is converted to
heat. It is converted continuously to heat by the process of friction between
moving parts, and by the time the platters stop moving, all of it that was
kinetic is now thermal.

~~~
gdee
I'm sorry if I seemed pedantic. It was not my intention. I took "all"
literally because I thought that it was important in that context. The problem
was pointed to be heat and I thought pointing out that heat is the result (and
directly proportional with) the inefficiency of the design (friction mainly)
and power drawn, would be useful. It thus seemed that increasing efficiency
and/or reducing power requirements would be a nice way of solving that
particular wish in the original article. Therefore I thought that assuming
heat was unavoidable was not a good/correct idea and tried to argue that. The
tone was already set to "let's make wishes". If you want to argue that all
energy goes to heat in the end... irreversibly even, I think you move to a
different level altogether.

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derefr
> Most code is in the first 80 characters, so having the abililty to see 300
> characters across usually just leads to a bunch of excessive whitespace.

Why isn't there a horizontal line-wrap as well as vertical? A text editor
that, when stretched horizontally beyond 80 columns, creates actual "text
columns" ala newspapers, and flows line 103 to the top of column 2 after line
102 hits the bottom of column 1. Wouldn't be that hard, would it?

~~~
jrockway
Well, he said he was using Visual Studio. Everything is hard in Visual Studio.

In emacs, I could see two files next to each other with C-x 3. Or, I could see
the same file in two columns by typing M-x follow-mode after C-x 3. (In fact,
I use a 1920x1200 display for most of my coding, and I end up with 3 emacs
windows next to each other. Very efficient. Wide-screen is _great_ for
coding.)

~~~
jasonkester
For what it's worth, this is Hacker News. We're polite here and try to avoid
snark whenever possible. We tend to offer explanations when we refute
something rather than resorting to name calling. Observe:

<http://img.expatsoftware.com/blog/vs_split.gif>

That's a screenshot of Visual Studio with files lined up in columns. It's
actually a really good development environment. You should give it a try one
day.

~~~
Calamitous
I have. Of many bugs, the random irretrievable code deletion feature was my
least favorite.

~~~
gdee
I've up voted you. Could someone explain the negatives? I had problems with
both Microsoft and Borland IDEs coerced to multicolumn (which had to be
multiwin, no other way) _on the same file_ too.

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scott_s
I used a ThinkPad T40 last summer, and I was surprised at how much I grew to
like it. But one thing drove me crazy: F1 was where esc should be:
<http://i.i.com.com/cnwk.1d/sc/20947059-2-200-DT4.gif>

Clearly, the keyboard layout was not designed by a vi user. Took me a few
weeks before I was moving my hand far enough to hit esc and not F1.

~~~
old-gregg
Don't you think it's actually better? Look how nicely Esc is separated from
other keys. Just like it should be on a real desktop keyboard.

I stopped using Thinkpads after they started using worst LCD panels in the
industry, but i will never, never forget their gorgeous full-size keyboards.
The picture you've posted brought a tear to my eye...

And yes, I'm a vim user.

Speaking of laptops: he correctly mentioned unfortunate proliferation of
glossy LCDs with limited vertical real estate, but there is more: _all_ laptop
LCDs now are 6-bit, i.e. 262k colors only.

~~~
scott_s
I see no reason to separate esc from the other keys.

"Better" or "worse" doesn't really apply. What matters is it's different from
every other keyboard I've used. To me, esc is the key above the tilde. You
wouldn't, for example, put the key for 'g' someplace else. My guess is the
person who designed the keyboard figured no one would care if esc moved,
because hey, who actually needs to use esc often?

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zmimon
This is one reason why learning either vi or emacs key mappings and then using
those in your IDE of choice is a vital skill. With these under your belt, your
hands should just about never have to leave the home row on the keyboard and
you can forget about where the freakin Home key is.

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jasonkester
I don't think the laptop manufacturers really understand how important that
Home block is to developers. It effectively rules out all but two
manufacturers from consideration. The _only_ choice of development machine is
a Thinkpad or a Dell (and only certain models from each line). All other
brands have eliminated themselves by unrolling that key block.

The Widescreen point also hit home, but since there are only two laptop
options anymore, and both of those offer models with a sanely proportioned
15.4" display, it's not really an issue anymore.

~~~
Zak
The home block is a little less important to me as an Emacs user, but I find
it very important in applications that don't have Emacs keybindings. I really
don't understand why most laptops don't use a layout similar to my Thinkpad.
Even the very compact Thinkpad X-series gets this right.

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jasonkester
The only point I disagreed with was the weight vs. heat one. I travel a lot
(think hitching across Africa, not flying to NYC on business), and the laptop
accounts for most of the weight in my pack. I very rarely use it on my lap for
any extended length of time, but there are times where I carry it on my back
for hours. 4 extra pounds would be a dealbreaker.

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tdavis
No sane person would use a fullscreen laptop, unless perhaps their ONLY task
was programming. Even then, it makes more sense to me to have my vim window
take up half the screen and something else relevant, say a browser, take up
the other half. Fullscreen is dead, please don't try to bring it back.

~~~
donaq
Vertical halves or horizontal halves? Personally, I use maximized vim and
browser windows. Alt + tabbing between vim and the browser is trivial, but I
need the extra screen space for vim because I often need to split vim between
several files. I'm sure I don't need to make a case for how alt + tabbing
between different vim windows quickly gets old.

~~~
tdavis
In that case, if you have a widescreen you can have two :vsplit going; on
fullscreen there probably won't be enough columns for that. FWIW, my personal
preference is having vim full-screen on one of my widescreen monitors which is
rotated into portrait view. I routinely have four or more :sp windows going.
Once again, far better utilization than with fullscreen.

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shadytrees
> But for the typical Visual Studio developer, this usually isn't the case.

You VS people sicken me. Speak for theeself, heathen! _{C-x 3 | Mod-Shift-
Enter}_

