OT: Recommended Linux Laptops, suppliers?

[Cliff Wells]

On Tue, 2003-03-18 at 13:26, Brian Quinlan wrote:
>  > Where do you get this info?  USB 2.0 is actually rated higher (480Mb)
> > than firewire (400Mb). 
> 
> You are comparing 1394 to USB 2.0. 1394b (which is what Apple now uses),
> is 800Mb. See:
> http://www.1394ta.org/Technology/About/1394b.htm

Ah.  I knew there was a more recent firewire, but wasn't finding a
direct reference to it (Apple's site seems fairly vague, or perhaps it's
because it doesn't work right under Mozilla).

> 
> > This is certainly a shortcoming, although most of the devices I've
> used
> > provide their own power anyway.
> 
> Which sucks. The last thing that I need is more power cables. 

Granted.

> > If I want my USB HDD to sit in a different room than my PC, I'll start
> > questioning my sanity <wink>.
> 
> But if you want to stream DV to/from your TV then it becomes a problem.

Well, perhaps, but not for me (my TV is less than a few feet from my
PC), besides I'd probably use the SVideo or composite video ports on my
video card for that anyway.  My TV lacks both USB and firewire <wink>.

> > > Did you look at Skip's numbers?
> > 
> > Certainly.  I still haven't seen the G4 numbers though.
> 
> He posted G4 numbers!    

Ah, when I saw Ti I thought Texas Instruments and completely missed the
"powerbook" below that.  That clears things up a bit ;)

> 
> Skip> Here are some Pystone numbers from my 800 MHz Ti
> Skip> Powerbook.
> 
> Skip>     Interpreter                 Best pystone
> Skip>     2.1                         10482
> Skip>     2.2                         11210
> Skip>     CVS                         13123
> 
> Scaling his G4 numbers up to 1GHz and scaling his PC down to 2GHz
> Celeron levels, the numbers become:
> 
> G4: 14012
> Celeron: 15916
>  
> Of course this comparison sucks for a bunch of reasons but it is the
> best we can do unless we can find people with both types of machines.

Mostly it sucks because Skip did it <wink>  As I mentioned earlier, I
doubt using the Cygwin port of Python is going to give very fair numbers
on the PC.  I haven't used those tools in quite a while, but unless
something has changed, you can expect a fairly large performance hit
under Cygwin.

> > It matters because we are flaming over Apple vs Intel.  Every number
> > counts at this point <wink>.  
> 
> Actually, no. You may be flaming Apple but I'm arguing that a G4 laptop
> is a reasonable platform for Python development.

I never said otherwise.  I have no real problem with Apple other than
their pricing.  I think OSX is a *huge* step forward for them, however I
don't see paying twice the price for half the performance (or equal
performance, for that matter), unless there is a real need for a
particular application that only runs on Mac.  Python certainly runs
well enough on less expensive platforms that buying a Mac for Python
development seems silly (unless the work is specifically for the Mac
port of Python).

> > > I would guess that writing a non-Apple client would be very
> difficult.
> > 
> > And this is why using X11 would have been a benefit (at least to some
> of
> > us).
> 
> I think that it would be difficult designing a powerful graphics server
> that is also easy to implement. Unless I'm mistaken, X still has
> problems with anti-aliasing, compositing and 2D transformations (*).

My entire GNOME2 desktop is AA.  I'm unsure of the others.  I certainly
haven't noticed a marked difference in performance on my desktop
compared to the G4's my gf uses at (art) school.  Well, nothing that
didn't make mine look faster ;)

> Apple has solved all of those problems plus a bunch of problems that the
> UNIX graphics people probably don't care about (like multiple-model
> device-independent color management).

Okay.  You've entered graphics-design-land and lost me.  This whole time
I thought that there were only 256 colors <wink>.

> (*) in Quartz, if you want to scale a graphics object by 20%, you just
> change a transformation matrix (as with OpenGL) and send that to the
> server. With X, you resend every graphics command needed to draw the
> object, after doing the transformation yourself. 

Or use a decent graphics library.  While X may not provide this
capability natively (it's probably considered outside the scope of X)
there are enough graphics libraries built on top of X that you shouldn't
need to do this sort of thing yourself.

-- 
Cliff Wells, Software Engineer
Logiplex Corporation (www.logiplex.net)
(503) 978-6726 x308  (800) 735-0555 x308