Choices, Choices
Nov 22, 2007
For $1500 you can buy or build yourself a nice desktop setup with a 24-inch monitor or you could just get a new keyboard.
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I've discovered a new corollary to Murphy's law.
Spilling coffee is attracted to the high voltage section of your laptop's motherboard. Ask me how I know!
Posted by: Cafe Alpha | Nov 22, 2007 at 04:53 PM
Ouch!
How old was the laptop?
Posted by: Isaac Schrödinger | Nov 22, 2007 at 05:18 PM
luckily the laptop was insured against accidents.
It was a brand new Dell. Oddly enough it had come with a faulty motherboard that Dell had sent a technician to replace just the day before. So the new motherboard had spent it's very short life, one night, downloading and playing Blood + episodes.
A new one is already on its way.
It was coffee with lots of sugar. I opened the machine up and saw the section down by the battery has frothy coffee caramel between pins and covering miniature resistors. It must be high voltage down there, or become high voltage when wet.
It's good that they're replacing the whole computer, because there was sugary coffee streaming out of the connectors. I doubt it was good for them, or the DVD burner.
New rule. You can't have food or drink AND a laptop in bed at the same time.
Posted by: Cafe Alpha | Nov 22, 2007 at 05:35 PM
On topic, I've always wanted a keyboard with displays on the keys. It's a great idea for an interface, though touch screens are going to be the way applications have custom finger interfaces, not expensive keyboards.
I also think a music-keyboard with lights and displays in the keys is a good idea, and filter controls that show what they're controlling.. I also wonder about how cool it would be to trash weird just-tone organized white/black key arrangement. Either no black key (but still 12 notes per octave) or alternating white and black are organizations I'd like to see.
Posted by: Cafe Alpha | Nov 22, 2007 at 05:53 PM
The first computer that I bought was a Dell laptop. This was in high school in the US.
That Dell Inspiron had a defective sound card. So, Dell support sent me a new laptop. I had to send back my old one but for a day or two I had two laptops on my desk. Oh, it looked so cool!
The keyboard will undergo upgrades but it'll be a few years before the price is under $100. (The mice are already there: A laser, cordless mouse from Logitech can be had for $60.)
Posted by: Isaac Schrödinger | Nov 22, 2007 at 06:25 PM
IN high school I had a TRS-80 with 16k of RAM followed by an Atari-800 with the full complement of 48k RAM and a disk drive. I must be older than you. By the end of high school I was writing video games, all of the high school kids who got computers got jobs that way...
It's amazing how cheap processor power has become. I got the cheapest two-core processor currently
made, an AMD. It's so far down their list that I don't think it's actually for sale to the public, only to manufacturers. The next processor up from it, with double the cache and 200mhz faster, goes for $40.
And yet, it's SO much faster than the pentium-M and P-pro it replaces, I'm amazed. Also, having seen the chip with the heat sink off, I can say that it's also probably the smallest PC-processor I've ever had on a motherboard. At 65nm even two core processors are tiny.
Late to dinner, gotta run
Posted by: Cafe Alpha | Nov 22, 2007 at 06:59 PM