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I had a low-end travel laptop that turned into my main laptop for three years when my previous laptop died. This $80 setup sounds cheap until you realize you'r

by danneu 13y ago

I had a low-end travel laptop that turned into my main laptop for three years when my previous laptop died. This $80 setup sounds cheap until you realize you're paying the real cost with your time. You'll pay the toll every time you: - Have more than a few browser tabs open, god forbid you plan on running Youtube in one of them. - Want to quickly open Firebug. - `rails server` or `rake test`. - Run out of 512mb after opening two apps. - Decide which tabs/apps to close to free up some resources. But those aren't even the best examples since the reality is that it's nickel and diming your time in a way you won't realize until you finally get a machine that liberates you from all the waiting.

6ren 13y ago
I think this is very true for the consumer-web (and therefore also web development), but not if you're purely using ancient unix tools that were fast on ancient hardware. They are incredibly fast on modern "low-end" hardware. Git is of this school. But to undermine my own point... can you really escape the consumer-web? Sites like github are JS heavy and very slow on old hardware. And, in practice, you'll want to use a PC for consumer tasks, like buying stuff, researching it, reading news, watching videos etc. Maybe it's worthwhile buying a special-purpose consumer-web device - a tablet? It's optimised for the web; and the web is optimising for it.
- danneu 13y ago
  Yeah, that's true. But at the end of the day your minimal ancient-unix hackerbook loses its luster when your computer chokes trying to open a Youtube link your friend sends you over your CLI jabber client stitched together with Awk no matter how much you hate the "consumer web". Sucks when you can't even take a moment to appreciate some Bruce Springsteen together with your IRC channel. Also, as a Rails and Clojure developer, I'm just trying to keep up with the boot time of my dev tools. ;)

by danneu 13y ago

6ren 13y ago

I think this is very true for the consumer-web (and therefore also web development), but not if you're purely using ancient unix tools that were fast on ancient hardware. They are incredibly fast on modern "low-end" hardware. Git is of this school. But to undermine my own point... can you really escape the consumer-web? Sites like github are JS heavy and very slow on old hardware. And, in practice, you'll want to use a PC for consumer tasks, like buying stuff, researching it, reading news, watching videos etc. Maybe it's worthwhile buying a special-purpose consumer-web device - a tablet? It's optimised for the web; and the web is optimising for it.

danneu 13y ago
Yeah, that's true. But at the end of the day your minimal ancient-unix hackerbook loses its luster when your computer chokes trying to open a Youtube link your friend sends you over your CLI jabber client stitched together with Awk no matter how much you hate the "consumer web". Sucks when you can't even take a moment to appreciate some Bruce Springsteen together with your IRC channel. Also, as a Rails and Clojure developer, I'm just trying to keep up with the boot time of my dev tools. ;)