261–270 of 288 posts
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I gave mine a second life as an Ubuntu machine. 2GB is... tight, for almost anything, and I'm a bit concerned about the wear all that swap puts on the SSD. Loved the form factor though, and yeah, that machine was my bread and butter for a solid year.
The irony that when I bought Slackware 2.0, my machine had 32MB.
After trying many models, I found the most practical overall for me is a ThinkPad T500 (highest-res tall-screen version, modded with a transplanted T60 keyboard, and the T-series CPU replaced with P9600 or P9700), and running Debian GNU/Linux with Xmonad. Bonus: at around $100 apiece, I can afford a few spares. The main downside is that it's noticeably vintage, which, given current industry ageism, isn't good optics…
I’m ashamed to say that this was a factor in upgrading from my venerable x200. The one time I decided to try my hand at interviewing for a coding position, the interviewer gave me a rather sniffy ‘what is that!’ When it came out of my bag. Doing onsite demos with a vga only vintage laptop also isn’t probably the best look.
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> Thin, light, very portable, USB ports on each side, headphone jack and an external monitor port (in this case, thunderbolt). Welcome to ~2004 in IBM ThinkPad X-series land, IBM "solved the laptop form factor" ~4 years prior to Apple's Air. And even before that Sony's PCG-Z505 delivered most of this in a robust and lightweight magnesium package.
"Welcome to ~2004 in IBM ThinkPad X-series land, IBM "solved the laptop form factor" ~4 years prior to Apple's Air." No. What goes without saying in my original comment was the fact that the MBA has an aluminum unibody. Aluminum (or other metal) unibody cases represented a major step forward in aesthetics, substance and durability. I don't care how interesting the thinkpads are (and they are interesting ) - I am not…
Plus unibody designs mean the whole laptop body needs to be replaced if there is damage instead of just replacing a single panel. High end Dell laptops are almost modular in comparison.
As someone coming from the other direction of this "hack", I agree with the author's point to match needs to hardware. Since being introduced to Linux in high school in the early 2000s, I have had a penchant for bringing old computers back from the dead. As a result, every laptop I have ever owned has been one that a friend or partner throws away when Windows gets slow. Every 3-5 year old laptop I have found can be b…
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That is really a bad example, but in general this is true for long German words. Often there's a similar combination of words in English, the only difference being that in German everything concatenates to one word and in English there are spaces between the words which describe the same concept.
Finnish also has lots of compound words. German might be different, but in Finnish words might sometimes have a slightly different meaning if the words are written separately (with a space) or as a compound. (Often that other meaning is rarely used, and there would almost never be any actual potential for confusion, but technically there may still be a difference.) Some of the compounds may be written as compounds be…
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Trouser cuffs do have a function. The extra weight helps the cloth drape better.
Could extra fabric be folded on the inside for the same effect without the dust collecting?
Yes, but you introduce other even more annoying problems, like your foot catching on the cuff when you put the pants on, and weird-looking vertical 'breaks' at the cuff fold.
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What is it you're doing that 13" can't cut it?
Small screens have small letters, small icons, etc. My eyesight is very good, but working on such a screen is uncomfortable after an extended amount of time (unless you lower the resolution significantly).
I've worked on a 13" screen all day long and have terrible eyesight and usually eye discomfort is that last thing I feel.
The 11" Macbook Air solved the laptop form factor. Thin, light, very portable, USB ports on each side , headphone jack and an external monitor port (in this case, thunderbolt). Could there be some refinements to my 2015 MBA ? Certainly - the two type-A USB ports could remain type A but be upgraded to USB3 ... you could add a USB-C port on each side in place of the magsafe and lightning ports and gain the ability to c…
swap(f, m)
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Has anyone else noticed that when conversations about “we need x word for y concept” arise, the German language nearly always seems to be the one that has something similar or already present?
It's because the German language is highly compound. Take any descriptive phrase, remove the spaces, and you have a new word. In English, it'd be the equivalent of taking "make worse by improving" and turning it into "makeworsebyimproving". When I was learning German, we were taught the language has far fewer core nouns than English (4000 vs 20,000 is stuck in my head, but this is going back years), but then they bas…
Like Sanskrit. Also, in Sanskrit, many words have multiple meanings, so when you string them together, there is often (somewhat of) a combinatorial explosion of overall meanings.
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It's because the German language is highly compound. Take any descriptive phrase, remove the spaces, and you have a new word. In English, it'd be the equivalent of taking "make worse by improving" and turning it into "makeworsebyimproving". When I was learning German, we were taught the language has far fewer core nouns than English (4000 vs 20,000 is stuck in my head, but this is going back years), but then they bas…
And we anglophones can make descriptive-with-more-readability words by comparison through the use of hyphenated adjectives.
descriptive-with-more-readability ... Common Lisp ... Lisp ... parentheses ... angled brackets ... Angles ... Anglophones.