Thursday, December 11, 2008

netbooks

Laptops are now called notebooks, because they get too hot to hold in one's lap. From the article: "A study by State University of New York researchers found that heat generated from laptops can raise the temperature of the scrotum, potentially putting sperm count at risk." Small laptops are now called netbooks (Firefox 3 spellchecker underlines the word red) because well, I don't know why. Maybe it's because they have a network interface, as opposed to normal laptops which somehow don't. There is some truth to that: my laptop's internal wireless card failed a few months after purchase. Fuck warranty, I wouldn't have been able to use my computer for a month or so while they repaired it. I tapped the card firmly and it started working again, it worked for another week and then it finally kicked the bucket. Given the low price of PCMCIA or USB wireless cards, fuck it. Maybe I'll reflow the solder some time (fuck BGAs and fuck RoHS (I wonder what they use to replace the Pb in CRT glass - you know, the Pb that shields you from the X-rays generated in the CRT)).
Anyway, thank Microsoft for indirectly limiting netbook performance.

2 comments:

etor said...

It's a netbook because you can go on the net with it and... not much more - it may not be suitable even for office applications, because of low performance. Of course, low performance affects the rendering of web pages as well.

Netbooks are fun, cause they're tiny and light.

razvan784 said...

I beg to differ. With 1.6GHz of x86 and 1GB of RAM (see article linked in post) you can do much more than walk the nets. That's almost as powerful as my desktop (1.8GHz, 512MB RAM) on which I do kernel compilation and FPGA synthesis. I mean, I was doing programming, officing and gaming on a 100MHz 486. You can also game, office and read documents on a small Jornada and you can also surf webs (quite slowly). You can write and compile C ok. And it literally fits in your pocket. It also did that 6 years ago.