₦airaland Forum

comments:

its not just features that sell a phone its the WOW Factor (coolness), power and ease-of0use.

all of which the iphone has in spades.

sorry, dude, symbian OS just doesnt come close to iphone OSX.

*not to mention that the entire design and concept was lifted off the iphone*

"Engineers".


tee heee heee.

tecnicians, you mean.

zukkymike:
this issue has been under debate in nl for over 2 years now.why bringing it up here again?

because the megalomaniac is yet to take his fraudulent website down. as long as he is still there promoting his version of tech history, we shall always be here to put him down.

@vesc

warmonger? im a pacifist but step on me toes and the sixth sense takes over and i dive head-in and do some awesome damage, darn the consequences.

and right now your snide remarks are edging you closer to the dangerous precipice. theres a threshold to how much jealousy i can take, just as thres a limit to how much i can suffer fools.

we can settle this over a pint, or you can drop the gauntlet and choose your weapon and lets duel. The Elf is "worth living for, worth killing for, worth dying for". wink-wink.

Chima considers himself a forefront tech head, forgetting he's just a retailer. funny enough even some SME's take his "advice" as gospel and base their Tech needs on that.

@Gamine

soon better be real soon, i dont aim to be going solo forever; theres this pixie giving me The Look. i think you got some competition, dahlin.

on AVP. well, waddaya expect? its Paul Anderson who made it. The Predator has fallen to absurdity right from the time the iconic hunter was merged with the Alien franchise, and it took a director well-heeled in the dubious art of filming the bizarre and the absurd to film the crossover.

did you notice that any flick featuring lance henriksen is bound to be shallow, plotless?

but still the first one, despite its failings, still bests the second installment which tried oh-so-hard to hit closer to the original Predator complete with the theme music and jungle setting.

i dont even know who directed that one.

oi, them are fighting words.

buzz of, dweeb.

jealousy earned you a righteous smack on the gob.


me and the Efl, haappy will be. its just for her to say I DO.

@hancock

the images come as separate downloadble resources, very hefty.

@vesc

i remember when Oga Tony was once a smalltime Amiga dealer in the defunct UTC before moving to Fina White House.

we made his broke-a5ss rich.

braining
stabbing
stampeding
reading your posts

Gamine:
I'm looking forward to it!!!!

so am i, ive even saved the picture in your profile (with hijab and all) and kept it safe on the bedside stand.

painfully waiting.

rrrrrrrrh!




you are one cute- aw, forgeddit.

so because he is igbo a fellow igbo should not expose his fraud?

abegi!

the man is a deceitful, lying egotistic sham.

the man is worse than a crook. read everything here:

http://magazine.biafranigeriaworld.com/cezeilo/2003nov09.html

and here:

http://www33.brinkster.com/iiiii/inventions/emeag.html

[quote author=ice_zik link=topic=69799.msg2888780#msg2888780 date=1223041870]NO new movies to comment on. Just watched the clear versions of Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk and the only thing to look forward too apart from Watchmen, is the Avengers movie. At least we know Samuel L. Jackson is Nick Fury.

It's sad that we live in a world where only Super hero or game or franchise movies are good movies. Anyway, later folks.[/quote]not looking forward to Blindness, City of Ember, pride and glory, max payne? or how about quantum of solace?

your info is vague: refuse to BOOT how? what does it show you? any error messages? did you try booting form the cd?

@Djcn

i feel you on pinning OS usage, there are sometimes different experiences when using various flavors of one OS, as the users of Tiger will say Leopard is eyecandy and less stable (I'm yet to establish that; i do agree update 10.5.4 almost broke my itunes connectivity to the Store among other issues), and the users of XP Home will have a slightly different experience from those using Xp Professional or Windows MCE or even Windows server 2003.

however for linux users the difference in distros can be wildly different; those on Gnome will find KDE a bit off and vice versa (though I'm much a Gnome fan), or Xfce etc. its also a bit different in package management (YUM, APT, etc).

i agree gaming laptops/desktops wont be replaced by netbooks (even though netbooks are not really intended to).

for now. 

but what if gaming itself moved online? the success of MMORPGs likve Everquest, Ultima, etc and the appeal of multiplayer online gaming, which ensured the success of Xbox Live and Xbox itself as well as the cloning of it by Playstation Network, suggests that players are willing to play (1) online, (2), with other people across vast geographical spans. also, LAN parties and fragfests seemed to solidify that perception that interconnected gaming is a thing of the future.

now in the near future in the era of cloud computing even gaming itself will not run on local machines; these net-connected machines will execute threads and processes but the actual brute work will be done up in the cloud. perhaps all gamers will do is install local clients that serve as a sort of portal to the online gamimg community and select what to play and who to play with via the portal (very much like Xbox live).

second life (www.secondlife.com) has shown remarkably that witha good enough graphics card and broadband internet, complex virtual societies (ala The Sims) can exist in the Cloud in full 3D glory. and second life only requires a client running on the guest computer. its not a game, but the principle and the virtual world is very game-like.

and remember the Asus netbook i posted earlier already has advanced 3D gaming capabilities, so whether locally or via the Cloud, the netbook has the native capability to handle advanced current-gen graphics.

I'm not sure how cloud computing will succeed; or how it will impact nigerians. but i can safely guess tat it will change computing as we know it by offering seemingly limitless virtual storage and infinite resources online connected in such a way that the line between online and offline will be considerably blurred. remember apps like Adobe AIR allow online apps to be run offline and some browsers are integrating this capability.


as for the iphone 3G i remarked in the phone thread that perhaps the obligations that come with offering the phone (subsidizing the phone, closing the phone to one carrier, hefty data fees, monthly contract charges and 2-year contract commitment which may be hard to enforce in naija given our arbitration/judicial system and weak regulators) may not properly reflect the business models of MTN and the rest. our carriers and Apple share different business models, it seems.

our networks do not tie phones to their services; most nigerians prefer prepaid to contract; monthly service charge may generate a furor; and data services in a phone you can't tether to your laptop will not take off. Blackberry, which YOU CAN tether, has not fully flown as it were.

eventually iphone 3G will trickle into naija into our open networks without Apple's dictative tendencies.


as for computer games; they improve much more than math skills. the benefits include improved hand/eye coordination, mental acuity, fast response, dexterity, problem solving skills etc.

hand building gaming rigs is the best option as per saving money, but soemtimes people often buy branded boutique machines for pure effizy (and aftersales support).

then again hooking up that liquid cooling system is a bother.


ive been working on makong a 3D FPS game since last year. its coming along poorly because of lack of time and building even one layer of the map takes almost 16 hours of computer time. blame that on my machines' resources. the development program runs only on windows else if it was linux i could get bigbrovar to help set up a distributed computing cluster with other machines so rendering will be faster.

i have numerous alpha-stage test builds and i want to incorporate online mode but its giving me headache. should i go UDP? TCP/IP? im not too good with transport protocols even though the software makes it easy.

im using FPS Creator (dead easy to use). however the direct x 10 version is out but it needs a highend Nvidia rig.

my point is, online capability in gaming is hard to implement. kudos to those guys.

Samsung wont let itself get caught napping. here is their netbook offering, the NC10 for $532 (or 299 british pounds, or 62,244 naira)

its running on intel Atom and windos XP.

compaq? thought it died at the hands of HP?

Micromanna, chima's place. he too is a HP addict, one of the very first to tell people NOT to buy a Mac.

he ought to be shot, or boiled in hot cooking oil or dropped in a vat of acid.

hey Vesc, coming in sunday. how many ways can you think of to kill off a man?

while you are slobbering all over the sexy orange wunderbox above (who says Acer makes crap?) allow me to respond to the naysayers of Cloud Computing.

if anyone had been following this thread they will perhaps form the opinion that cloud computing is someting fancy to relegated to the dustbin of history as most technological, groundless fads have done (eg boo.com), especially going by the comments of Flyuche and Gamine.

well, it seems even industry monoliths are taking the concept serious, going the by the recent statements of microsoft CEo steve ballmer. it appears microsoft is working on introducing an entirely new OS besides windows 7 that the company has tagged "Windows Cloud operating System". now that is separate from the Midomi project microsoft is working on and here is a quote regarding Midomi:

" The basis for the platform centers around research related to Microsoft's Singularity project, and envisions a distributed environment where applications, documents, and connectivity are blurred in a cloud-computing phantasmagoria which can be run natively or hosted across multiple systems. The researchers are working to create a concurrent / parallel distribution of resources, as well as a method of handling applications across separate machines -- religiously-dubbed the Asynchronous Promise Architecture -- which will set the stage for a backwards-compatible operating system built from the ground up, with networks of varying size in mind. Says the SD Times, "The Midori documents foresee applications running across a multitude of topologies, ranging from client-server and multi-tier deployments to peer-to-peer at the edge, and in the cloud data center. Those topologies form a heterogeneous mesh where capabilities can exist at separate places."

http://www.downloadsquad.com/2008/10/01/microsoft-to-launch-windows-cloud-operating-system-soon

Microsoft is attempting to move customers away from windows to Midori over time. for the best info hit this link:


http://www.sdtimes.com/MICROSOFT_S_PLANS_FOR_POST_WINDOWS_OS_REVEALED/About_CLOUDCOMPUTING_and_MOBILEDEVELOPMENT_and_NET_and_SOASAAS_and_SOFTWAREDEVELOPMENT_and_WINDOWS_and_MICROSOFT/32627


meanwhile here is ballmer's actual quote regarding Windows Cloud:

" We need a new operating system designed for the cloud and we will introduce one in about four weeks, we’ll even have a name to give you by then. But let’s just call it for the purposes of today ‘Windows Cloud’, Just like Windows Server looked a lot like Windows but with new properties, new characteristics and new features, so will Windows Cloud look a lot like Windows Server"

as for the interoperability issues Djcn raised earlier, the article further says;

"Ballmer also hinted at what would be built into the new OS, including geo replication, how to design apps intended to commingle [we think he means appeasing regulators by providing more interoperability], management modelling and an SOA model, to effectively create a new platform.

“We’re not driving an agenda towards being service providers but we’ve gotta build a service that is Windows in the cloud,” admitted Ballmer.

He also hit out at internet kingpin and pesky rival Google.

“If you talk to Google they’ll say it's thin client computing but then they’ll issue a new browser that’s basically a big fat operating system designed to compete with Windows but running on top of it,” he said."

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/10/01/steve_ballmer_windows_cloud/


so guys, prepare for your data going up in the Cloud.

Gamine:
The netbook is a no-go area for me.

i hate small screens, the smaller it is, the farther away i am.

The bigger, the better.

I'm sure i got something bigger, and i swear its better for you. and i aint talking about no darn netbook neither.

tempted?



on gaming rigs, check out this cool Acer Aspire Predator. spex are:


(for the high end system)

1.  2.83GHz Q9550 Intel Core 2 Quad (again 4 processor core)

2.  GeForce 9800GTX graphics

3. 4gigs RAM

4. three 640GB drives (almost 2 terabytes of storage).

5. 24 inches 1920 x 1200 LCD (slightly better than True HD, or 1080p)

6. liquid cooling system

Alienware, watch your back. this Predator, characteristically, is cheaper.

Gamine:
My Hausa is very Rusty, don't know the hausa word of rusty

Samir, Ina fata kana lafiya

the literal equivalent of rusty is tsa-tsa (if you an proniunce it), but its not directly applicable in the context you mean.

incidentally, where is paiko?


@logica

ive seen the pricetags in both countries you mention and, this is just me, but i dont thing GPS and 3G are justifiable counterweights to the hefty price of over $600. location-aware apps are all fine and good but i cant find maps for naija, and Google Maps doesnt offer much Points of Interests to bolster these apps.

ive tried Gmaps with the GPS in both N95 (which has a weak receiver) and the N82 (superb). besides very few landmarks there really arent POIs to make it interesting and i cant find free 3rd party maps to satisfy me.

bottomline; im hanging on to the iphone 1st gen until the 2nd gen comes down in price.

afterall, apps for one work just as well in the other.

@Flyuche

your point seemingly boiuls down to "whoneeds a netbook when they can get a laptop"? well, its a bit like saying "who needs a mobile phone when they ca get a cordless landline phone"?

portability in a mobile world is what fuels the netbook revolution.

im not deeply engrossed in netbooks, but i understand the reason for their being. laptops are becoming increasingly bigger albeit slimmer; but bigger nonetheless. HP has a 20 incher, most are on the 17 inch screen territory.

this partly made the Macbook Air appealing to the upwardly mobile. netbooks are looking at that niche the MA is targeting; why lug around a hefty 17inch laptop when all you do is surf the web and create documents in an environment where a netbook will suffice?

that is the rationale.

mobile phones are geting smaller, laptops too need to shed weight. afterall 80% of computing is core computing (surfing, documents, email etc) especially in a business atmosphere and mind you netbooks are targeting the bsiness segment agressively rather than home users who essentially use their systems for media.

@Djcn

it doesnt matter the number of linux distros; linux by its kernel nature is immeasurably portable. everyone of those distros just take the kernel and adapt it for their own purpose, or fork off a distro (like Ubuntu which is based on Debian).

windows xp doesmnt come close in this level of portaility; the next best thing regarding embedded that microsoft has is WinCE.

(heres a Microsoft joke: Windows CE, ME, NT = CEMENT ).

this windows CE is what powered Windows Smart Displays.


as for bandwidth for the first time my MTN 3G hit 127kb/s yesterday, but only for a while before sliping back down (it was in HSDPA mode).

still not enough for massive gigabyte downloads. hopefully we will get there.

@Logica

you are probably right. ours are operators who think short-term immediate profits. the concept of subsidizing expensive phones and offering them with data plans and contract fees may not entirely agree with their business models. i mean the blackberry is offered with a data plan and unsubdsidized and thus very few people actually bought them.

@Flyuche

every emerging tecnology has its dissenters, Flyuche, and to this day technology that existed for sometimes decades still gets ripped by pundits who just don't get it. what has been happening here all this while? it was me versus Djcn tearing apart two stalwarts of computing: Apple and microsoft.

it is no surprise someone thinks cloud computing is "stupid" even though its in its infancy. do you remember a time when Bill gates said 16k of memory was enough for eveyone? well, we are now on track to 1TB of memory for high-end servers and some consumer machines can take as much as 32gb of RAM as we speak-er, type.

in the dawn of the internet it was seen as a passing fad, now it dominates computing across all strata of life. Web 2.0, which is the precursor of cloud computing, was also seen as an ephemeral thing.

it makes sense putting everything online; the early computers had their foundation rooted in networking human beings, then it became networking terminals, then networking mainframes and minis, now we have the internet. Data is much more secure stashed in remote servers outside of the local machine. you can lose that machine but you never lose your data.

the direction of technology is not determined by opinion; ancillary and auxiliary services as well as component makers sometimes nudge computing in the proper direction. and the web 2.0 services which form the outside layer of cloud computing mostly dictate the direction everyone is heading (see the success of youtube, flickr etc).

besides, there isnt a big deal of anticipation or expectation; its a subconscious movement towards the fully integrated online direction.

and its not always all doom and gloom when your private data resides securely on server clusters owned by the likes of google and microsoft. they are much more secure than when residing locally on your harddisk. in any case where do you think your banking, credit card and ATM details reside? in online servers maintained by the banks or its affiliates. if such details were local on your computer imagine the havok that will ensue were your system to crash, get wiped out or stolen.


@Djcn

and those web 2.0 services use common standards (Ajax, LDAP, Flash etc) so intercommunication will not be an issue. google was able to successfully integrate all its online services (google docs, google talk, gmail, Google maps etc) and over time i expect tose services will talk with other online services (like share calendars etc) since the tools used to create such online services are standards-based.

I'm not saying there is a hurried pace to get there; eventually in the near future we will get there.

its inevitable.

i do agree on the bandwidth issue, and seemingly bandwidth is never enough. but then goodnews is on the horizon; Verizon FioS, which uses fiber optics, has speeds of about 32mbps. for streaming whatever content, even HD movies, that is more than enough. but like you said, when that will trickle to Africa is anyone's guess. maybe when our politicians get their acts together, the rest of the world will take africa seriously as less of a burden and more a market and invest heavily in infrstructure.

@bigbrovar

linux is more suited to mobile and embedded devices because of the nature of its being. it is much pliant to slimming down unlike windows XP. microsoft cannot use Windows CE because of its severe limitations so the next best thing is XP. it surprises me that Microsoft, with al its resources, know-how, and legacy cannot see beyond the failings of windows mobile and create a new slim operating system for the mobile world. i mean, Symbian, Android, Linux (though Android is based on linux) and now Mac OS X portable are dominating the mobile scene when windows has the potential for trouncing them all.

i guess its one more example of microsoft's ineptitude.


PS: contrary to my earlier statememnt, it seems HP is well into the Netbook thingy. their 2133 Mini-Note Netbook runs on a 1.6GHz C7 M ULV VIA CPU (VIA, for gawdssakes!!) and 2gig of DRAM memory. however its pretty expensive in comparison for almost the same performance to the Acer Aspire. it comes in flavors of vista asic, XP, Suse Linux and freeDOS.

pic below.

earlier on bigbrovar and i were talking about cloud computing and netbooks.

here is my prediction.

1. a few years from now all computing will move online in a paperless office of the future. case in point: the growth of Ajax, google Docs, Zoho, Splashup (similar to photoshop, see pic below), Adobe Air, InstaCalc, App2You, Yahoo Webmessenger, meebo, sosius etc and Zimbra. more and more devices now are already offloading their contents into the "cloud" by syncing or direct upload, to services such as Fanbox. eventuially the concept of the local harddisk will be a thing of the past.

like ThinClients, computers will become dumber, running only the OS needed to give them life, while the soul of their purpose resides online. soon music, documents, videos, photos, contacts, telephony and other communications, will all be up in the internet cloud and we shall live our lives innundated by the radio waves needed to keep our digital wireless hub breathing. think online radios, online albums (like flickr), Netflick etc. iTunes is already well on the air. already music and photos have gone digital. have you noticed the recent tide of browser-based games?

2. in cases where the Operating system needs to be installed or reinstalled, I'm predicting it shall e done online devoid of installation CDs. already Microsoft is researching in ways of how to sell software online and be installed straight from the servers in the cloud. in fact we already have online operating systems. YouOS is a virtual OS that you an customize.

3. soon devices will talk to each other across diverse proprietary spectrums, and keep content up to date via syncing. the days of the Sneakernet are numbered.

i arrived at my predictions based on my oservation of current trends and the direction technology is headed. Apple's .Mac service, which now is known as MobileMe, is also ahead of the competition in some respects.

at the end of the day, Digital rights Management, bigger bandwidth, and the death of piracy (at least to some extent; hacking and cracking is becoming more difficult everday) are on the horizon.

so don't let the terms "Cloud Computing" or NetBooks be alien to you.

and already Acer is way ahead of HP in the netbook revolution.


cheers.

PS: the application you see below (pix) is an Adobe Photoshop clone. its not running locally on my system, it is an online application made using Ajax technology.

that depends. somehow i find japanese cars luxurious and european cars spartan. but driving them is something else.

are we talking about cars?

switch back to Acer vs HP, then.

@gamine

dama kina jin hausa? kin san ina son ki ko? ke nawa ne.

@samir
keep your pale blue butt in your kazaure/katagum/wherever as long as you wanna be hitting on my girl. which budan kai? you getting hitched? who's the poor unlucky girl. will be back in kaduna suposedly soon, hols over. dang!

@Logica

do you get the 3G signal issues I'm reading about all over blogdom? is it an AT&T thing? and how much did the total package cost you, since i don't think you bought the phone on contract.

or did you?

adahna:
well u guys are gettin me more confused oh,make i no lie

you've already had Mad Max spell it out for yer, what the heck are ya whining about?

@Sojioguns

that Volvo S60 was once voted safest car on the planet. funny you should mention this, because recently i was asked what midsized commuter car i'D love to buy if i were to buy a car right now; almost everyone predictably gunned for a Honda/Toyota, 2 kias and one BMW.

i said an Audi A4, or the new Passat.

they were like, "huh"?

in cars of its range, i don't think anthing beats that passat for sheer driveability

but thats for another thread.

as for MTN, once upon a time the Elites bought MTN, and the poorer members of the household settled for then-called Econet even though Econet was first with SMS delivery report and had low cost scratch cards among other things.

its like when i bought my first Sendo X and my mates kept ripping me for not buying a nokia smartphone even though technically the Sendo X was a more advanced symbian phone then. buggy, sure, but one cool sexy machine nonetheless.

and even now it still happens all over; if your phone aint a nokia, it must imply you are a broke-ar5se playing second fiddle.

beats me, that.

samir101ng:
@ Ex Inferis

Abeg, e don do. you wan kill me with laptops ? Chei, see laptops. Those Alienware and Falcon Northwest laptops are the bomb. Such a shame that getting those in naija is going to be near impossible and VERY expensive.

yes sir. i don stop sir.

the purpose was to draw peoples attention to variations in the market in terms of whatever catches your fancy: hightech, spes, price, power, colors.

some peolpe really think HP is the be-all-end-all of computing, and by narrowing their choice to one singular item they are unnecessarily locking out possibilities of better bargains and suitable machines out there.

mind you, not that HP is total crap, but most of the Asian-made Hps we see in Naija are lightly inferior in quality to the Asian-made ones in the states.

not everone needs a Mac; but thats because not everyone KNOWS the difference between a Mac and a PC, or the strengths and weaknesses of both. i can only pray our time and effort yield open mindedness in the buying public such that they will not be sweet-mouthed by the Store Guy into paying more for features they dont need (like me, i dont need no fingerprint scanner; i keep my porn and nuclear blueprints elsewhere . im not terminally paranoid ).

incidentally note hat those Alienware and falcon machines are not mainstream, for everyone; they are specialist gaming machines that will also be useful in graphics/video works. beyond that their price tag is pretty unjustifible economically.
so only kick-ar5se gamers will have the kind of mental fortitude so requisite in shelling out such a lot of cash for what eseentially will appear as "just another laptop" to joe Average.

[quote author=T@meD0 link=topic=171330.msg2871299#msg2871299 date=1222737094]agaba123 (m)
UK
Posts: 1824
« #31 on: September 22, 2008, 09:40:16 AM »

off topic. abeg make una no vex
a friend called me and asked me to buy a lappy for him.
Not that h needs it but is now a fashion statement in naija. Everybody carries it around whether they are going to church or bible study. When they visit a friend, it is a sign that one has arrived.

Is that true? Grin Grin
=================================================================================================
ROFLMYO!  agaba my guy, how u dey now?  long time.  omo, u dey craze o!  i no go dey surprised o, no be naija we dey talk about? very soon, agbero and hin driver go dey take am do GPS sef.  naija we hail thee! 


@ Ex-Inferis, you've made some very valid points in your posts and just like you I go for the specs based on my need and my pocket (as baba ijebu concern now  ).  unfortunately, our naija folks' mentality no go lai lai change no matter how much you try convince them, which is kind of sad.  na brand names go kill us for naija (well, the ones wey dey buy into it anyway).  what kills me is that most of these peeps don't want to take the time to look around and compare specs/prices but are just fixated with brand names that in most cases cost a lot more than an unpopular brand.  acer is giving yeye HP/Compaq, Sony (another over-priced piece of shit, excuse my french!), Toshiba a run for their money in the states, which of course our effizy lovers for naija are unaware of.  anyway sha, make u leave them make them dey waste them money o jare (swegbes)  [/quote]i would love to believe people carry laptops around for diferrent reasons; i used to haul mine to friends' long ago to have a blast at Halo, or pilfer someones playlists and Divx movies. but i never carried one to impress.

im guessing the scenario we had when mobile phones were just hitting the market in circa 2001 is what is recurring again if indeed its true people lug around notebooks to impress. i remember a time when a Motorola Talkabout earned one a star rating, now it earns you curses and physical attacks.

eventually people grew up (or at least outgrew the habit) and now mobile phones are as fashionable as piles of rock, especially with the tokunbo market.


as for those people who dont want to scour the market for other laptops before committing; well partly its laziness, partly is because most nigerians are Luddites, favoring the gool old status quo over technological advantage of change; and partly its down to their non-sceptical minds willingly sponging the crap of the Store Guy who tells them the purchase they are about to make is the best thing to have ever hapened to them.

ART/Showtime keys here

www.soirnet.com

davidif:
you are right about that vieira.

it took Vieira to convince you, even though supposedly you watched the movie? and yet you were arguing?

im not the sort that just sponges recycled action formula without substance and call it 'interesting".

MI was an intelligent espionage movie with Ethan hunt relying on his cunning to save the day.

MI2 was a hackjob that suddenly saw Ethan transform from the mild mannered spy to s superman, jumping off cliffs without so much as a harness, flying in the air in defiance of gravity etc. it was vintage Woo; ballistics without brains.

and the third installment was capitalism at work, attempting to rake in some fan bucks over what is essentially tripe.

check out this Voodoo laptop.

Dual GeForce G70M “Ultra” 256MB

a WSXGA 19″ display capable of resolutions of up to 1680×1050 pixels
an AMD Turion ML/MT CPU

160GB HDD

Internal Digital Card Reader 4-in-1

8-channel surround sound with 4 embedded speakers and subwoofer
8X ENVY DVD+-RW Dual Layer Slot-Load DVD & CD Writer

gigabit Ethernet + MiniPCI expansion

more pix.

1. Area 51

2. more area51 liquid cooling with 5 cooling fans

3. Falcon NorthWest Fragbox (for LAN parties, think Unreal 3!! )

4. the Falcon NorthWest FragBook
(Intel Core 2 Duo Extreme X6800 2.93GHz processor, 4GB of RAM, two NVidia GeForce 7950GTX Go 512 MB Graphic cards, and up to 3 SATA hard drives.)

@BigBrovar

Saurik's Cydia brings Apt packaging to iphone/Ipod, and since the login details of the two products became open ( user Root, password Alpine) third party Terminals give access to Darwin/Marvell commands to be run. i use putty on Mac for sessions, and WinSCP on windows to copy files and set permissions when i do copy. in the end, the iphone/ipod arent so closed anymore (not after jailbreaking).

I'm not really into Nokia (though i got a nokia 5610 XpressMusic the other day as a gift) so I'm not into the N810. whats happening with OpenMOKO? I'm keenly awaiting the potentials of Android; if done right it will create a revolution and hopefully kill symbian.

@karmamod
seconded, it was hyped up too much for being thin, but specs wise its utter rubbish. I'm not sure what market segment the Air is trying to fill, but if its ultraportables its off the mark. seeen the OQO? now that is my definnition of an ultraportable. to me the only great thing anout the Air is the very bright and colorful display.

@Djcn
no, i don't mean that portege. te portege I'm talking of came out way before the Air. will look in my mags and see if i can find the model number. the one you refer to is that one with the funny tagline "Lighter than Air". also, no matter the noise Apple fans make, I'm glad someting people are breaking off the windows stranglehold and delving into other options out there. it doesnt have to be Mac, even Linux to me is a far better OS to windows in many respects. have you tried BSD yet? I'm sure you will love it, being closer to the actual Unix than the rest.

i don't merit Air's remote disk as a good notion; on the contrary configuration is dead easy, but its still a hassle having to piggyback on another system's cd drive just to install software or whatever. what if you were caught in a location without another system and you absolutely had to use a cd drive (say your Air crashed and you need to repair the installation?)

components made of sand. yup, its true, but not just any sand. its silicone sand. some peole might get the impression you mean the very sand under their feet. Penry, however, the entire santa rosa chipset, used zirconium and not silicone.

for gaming give me Alienware Area 51 any day or the Falcon Northwest. next up  is the Dell XPS. Alienware now has a quad SLI (four freaking GPUs!!!) in the Aurora ALX system (see pix.)

check out that sexy Alienware curved display unveiled at CES 2008.(see pix)

the Dual Zone ThermalTake liquid cooling system of the Area51 (pix).

Mac users, google these great config tools

Cocktail and Onyx. They work in both Tiger and Leopard.