OT: Recommended Linux Laptops, suppliers?

[Brian Quinlan]

 > 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


> 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. 

> 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.

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

He posted G4 numbers!    

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.

> 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 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 (*).
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).

(*) 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. 

Cheers,
Brian