What I want. A Fried Toast tantrum

Do you need a laptop? If you want all that stuff, just build a desktop.

I would have to agree -- the primary reason for getting a laptop is mobility -- and with such a setup, mobility would nearly be out of the question (forget ever running such a machine on battery power -- you'd be lucky to get 1 hour of runtime). You could definately build a desktop with a fairly small tower and 17" LCD, and still be well under the cost of a similarily-equipped laptop. Of course, the drawback is that desktop LCD's just don't have the same resolution as their notebook equivalents (still one of my biggest annoyances with desktop LCD's).

Well I guess you are SOL then eh?. The specs etc you asked for are not goign to happen, you want crazy power and a HUGE screen with a small form factor. You want multiple HD's as well, how exactly do you expect all that to fit in a "managable" size. The cooling and the HD's alone are going to make the thing BIG. As far as I know everything you want is available in the 8890. Either suck it up and buy one or wait for 5 years when that config may be viable in a small form.

You can always wait for the next top-secret uber Sager machine:

http://www.eurocom.com/support/all%2...m?model_id=123




But then again... it is Eurocom

Hopefully PCT will mention this machine soon


Dont like it? Look at my butt

pb, you need to oxycute some of those volcanoes.

But the point is right on, Toast, you want an 8890 but consider it too big and clunky, have you looked at the dimensions of the 8790? Its wider, about the same depth and only slightly thinner. The weight is also roughly the same, 8.6# without battery, so make it 11# with.

Your point Toast, is well taken, when will the notebook designers start getting real with designs and do something serious. I get so tired of compromising. I want a big whacking screen with high resolution and great performance. I want the highest performance processor available, I may get a step or two down for cost to benefit reasons, but I want to be able to get the creme of the crop. I want at least 2 and preferably 3 smart bays that can hot swap anything: any kind of drive or batteries. I want a TV Tuner that doesn't hog the line in. Frankly, I'd like discreet lines in and out for everything. I want a 102 keyboard. I want good 802.11 g built in. I'd like all the plugs and ports to be on the sides so I don't have to fumble around back there trying to plug something in. If the weight can be kept to around 12#, I can live with that. Overall size is not a big issue with me but it is with some. I believe using modular bays and ports and locating them in specific places would help significantly with that. I'd like to see better passive cooling. Yeah, maybe a fan would be needed occasionally, but 95% of the cooling should be passive. If the case were metal, specifically aluminum, and they used heatpipes effectively, that might be possible. But the biggest thing would be to make a modular chassis, a set of modular main boards and a set of modular components. I'd even go so far as to have only modular bays, maybe two on each side. Then you could pick and choose what you wanted to plug into them. Ports, drives, batteries. You could configure your machine on the fly.

I think people have to start realising that designers often have to make choices based on technology (some part will only fit in some places) , heat etc etc, most laptop designers are working based round 3rd party tech and so have to make the machine fit the pieces - not the other way round. I want everything under the sun and my cake as well , but I am not naive enough to think that the engineers are not giving it to us just to piss us off.

You just have to make compromises. If you want more power and more stuff you will have a heavier laptop. I bought mine as a desktop replacement. I don't carry it around everywhere. You can also get one of the those carts to drag it around on. Right now one the biggest obstacles for High Powered Laptops is the Battery time. If a 2 lb battery that fits into the laptop lasted 8 hours or more, you would see a lot more people with them even if they weigh 12 lbs.

I don't think its done to piss anybody off, but there's always the Xerox factor. When Xerox (formally Halloid-Xerox) finally perfected the office copier, the 914 in the late 50s, Chester Carlson offered it to IBM for essentially a small royalty fee. IBM studied it for over a year and finally rejected it because: 1) the per copy cost was 10x that of mimeograph, 2) they didn't see any market for high quality copying. Major mistake, probably the biggest corporate booboo of all time. Well, second biggest. I'll get to that. In any case, it was a lack of vision. Can't, never did. The old, if the big boys are doing it, its probably not worth doing, line.

So, Carlson went ahead and developed Xerox on his own, the 914 became one of the greatest successes of all time. Xerox became a major player in the business world. Carlson, seeing what happened with IBM decided to never end up there and created the Palo Alto Research Center, he picked Palo Alto because it was a long ways from the bean counters and nay sayers at Xerox headquarters and it was in the burgeoning tech center of what was to become Silicon Valley and it was close to Stanford, a major research center at that time. PARC was amazing, they developed or were instrumental in developing virtually everything about computers today. They came up with WIMP (Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointers), laser printing, the concept of the notebook computer, ethernet, etc, etc, and contributed heavily to the such things as the internet. Unfortunately, they never patented any of it nor really developed any of it beyond the basics. Steve Jobs took all of what became the Lisa directly from PARC, he couldn't get it to work so he hired a lot of the PARC staff and they came up with the MacIntosh and the Mac OS, based directly on PARC's SmallTalk 80, is still the basis of Apple's OS today. Xerox didn't even monopolize the laser printer. In other words, Xerox ended up being exactly what they worst feared, a shortsighted mega corp like IBM. And that's the biggest business boo boo of all time. If Xerox had had the foresight to develop what PARC created, everything to do with computers today would probably have the Xerox brand name on it.

Its not having to work with limits that slows advances, its thinking you have to work with limits. There are other factors as well, such as fear of failure. Even worse is the fear of success but that's another matter entirely. In any case, its no more difficult to make it right than it is to make it wrong, the only difference is the willingness to not try. A corrollary to that is the infamous line about there's never enough time or money to do it right the first time but there's always enough to fix it later.

For anybody interested, check out Ars Techinica's referal to the Draper Awards, the engineering equivilent to the Nobel Prizes, and this year's recipients, the four main people at PARC. There's also a NPR radio broadcast interview with three of the recipients that's quite interesting. The url is
http://www.sciencefriday.com/pages/2...r1_022704.html

Brings back memories of the movie Pirates of Silicon Valley.

NIce story marq, i guess we can all learn a lesson from the big mistakes.

I need to what?

Silly thread.