I paid £1500 for my Thinkpad T40. It has given me 8.5 yrs of typing and computing pleasure as my main (and current) device for £165/year*. At the time, others bought consumer grade laptops for £1000 (they were, back then!), which gave them 1 year of computing misery for £1000/year.

*ok, I'll confess I've upgraded the RAM to 1Gb (~£100), the harddrive to 160Gb (~£80) and replaced the fan (£25), and the OS (10.04-£free).

True story that many have seen.

I saw a world-expert who was invited to a plenary lecture at an international conference giving his talk (which was meant to be the highlight of the conference) - when he was rudely interrupted by a pop-up which caused the fullscreen presentation to lose focus. The pop-up was indicating that it was about to shut down to complete the updates, and had a timer from 15s. An embarrassed projectionist quickly clicked on the 'delay' 15min button in a panic. He would have had to have selected another option from the dropdown menu to have chosen a longer time. But of course 15min later, the same thing happened again. This time the projectionist was prepared and quickly selected an option to bother it an hour later.

What a f***ing joke piece of s*** software!

I wonder if this will be a problem for linux, if linux on the desktop really takes off. Looking at android, I guess so.

In 2005, before people realised the enormity of the pending financial crisis, having a blackberry in the city gave you the look of a soon-to-be rich cityboy/girl. Afterall, these people had had RIM's pager's since the late 90's - issued to them so that they could be on-call for their respective banks 24/7. Back then, they were expensive, and generally, only people who needed them, had them.

Fast-forward to 2010, and suddenly every kid seemed to sport a cheap plastic phone with a qwerty keyboard. Suddenly, the city-types didn't look quite so good with their company-issued ball-and-chains, and asked for iphones instead.

Blackberry have taken a step in the right direction by returning to the their old market - as long as their image isn't permanently tarnished and they get the blackberries off the children, I can see them becoming a small, but important mobile manufacturer catering for city/business/enterprise types.

As people have mentioned before, simply creating the product and making it available isn't going to miraculously rejuvenate computer programming in the UK amongst children. After all, many children already have access to computers capable of running python as it is - and so do schools. If schools want to teach computer programming, it doesn't actually need a raspberry pi.

I think the next step is to create tutorials for the raspberry pi, and to ensure that schools aren't penalised for teaching computer programming (as in it won't detract from teaching time and achieving targets in other subjects), and I think the only way to do that is to make computer programming a new GCSE, with a curriculum, exams, and formal teaching time.

...depending on your browser, OS and graphics.

On my 8 year old thinkpad, the animations are pretty jerky on both chrome and firefox, but firefox's font is wrong. On a recent dell, the animations are nice and smooth, but the writing is unreadable on chrome, and some words are missing on firefox.

I really like the idea of this, and if you ignore the flashy presentations above, you could see how it might be useful to present an overview of something complex, but requiring discussion of certain parts of it in detail. However, I also agree that 'flashiness' needs to be avoided in presentations (NB flashiness is the better of the two evils when compared with speakers using their slides as their own notes).

The best presentations I've seen have come as a well thought-through narrative from the speaker, with graphics there only to illustrate their points.

I like this answer - many thanks. I might try running a headless T40 with emacs and org-mode (I use this already for my todo list). If it fails, I think I'll stick to pen and paper!

D

I agree that people toe-in there mirrors too much - I have mine set so that I can see a slither of body work. However, it's dangerous to think that you do not have a blind spot - an entire car can fit into it if they are two lanes to the right of you, and slightly behind. Usually you can see the car if you physically turn your head to the right, but with largish central-pillars you can completely miss this.

The way to deal with it is to always ensure you keeping track of cars in your mirrors, so that you can predict when people will go into that blind spot. But sometimes you can lose count, and other times you will be concentrating on something else. For that reason I ALWAYS use my signals on the motorway, and keep an eye out the corner of my eye whenever I move out.

Yes, I think you're right, and I also think GPS data won't discriminate enough (I guess we'll find out in 5 years time).

The whole idea horrifies me, though. Though it shouldn't horrify me any more than TomTom collecting data on your movements.

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