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by schmrz 4681 days ago
As others have pointed out this is far from being accurate. You most definitely don't need awesome hardware to learn how to code. In fact I wasn't sure if that quote about quitting over bigger monitors is serious or not but after following the linked article it seems to be.

I also wrote an article about how bad hardware actually made me a better programmer: http://www.randomshouting.com/2010/12/14/Scarce-hardware-as-.... Not trying to spam my articles or anything, I just feel like it's an interesting contrast to this article.
1 comments
illyism 4681 days ago
It's almost as if everyone has their own methods of learning and their own opinions.

I have two 27 inchers and one 24 inch monitor. And recently I've discovered that I'm more productive on a 15 inch XP laptop gone ubuntu from 2003 than on my high-end PC at home.

Workspaces are almost as fast as looking at another screen and I'm able to concentrate more at the task at hand.

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ANTSANTS 4681 days ago
I don't mind the tiny screens of laptops so much, it's their keyboards murdering my wrists that do me in. I can type on a generic PS/2 keyboard for hours and hours, but I literally cannot use my Thinkpad for more than 10 minutes without cursing the gulf of space between the edge of the device and where the keys are situated. The worst part is that I have the touch pad disabled in the BIOS, so the placement of the keys at the back of the device is not only painful but also completely pointless for me.

I otherwise love the hardware, but I would readily chuck it for something with a "cellphone-class" CPU, if it looked like this:

http://images.businessweek.com/ss/08/02/0215_laptop_history/...

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DennisP 4680 days ago
I've been thinking that an ideal mobile device for serious coding would be a Dell XPS 18 plus a mechanical keyboard. http://www.dell.com/us/p/xps-18-1810/pd

It's not handy for putting on your lap, but for coffeeshop use it'd be great. 18" screen, weighs five pounds, no laptop keyboard getting in the way. Making it play well with Linux seems to be a bit of a challenge, from the forum posts I've seen, and an upgrade to Haswell would be nice.

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