‘Cause we got a little COM port, pluggin’ through the night,
Yeah, we got a little COM port, ain’t she a beautiful sight.
As a sysadmin myself with 24 years on the job, I’ve found that the form factor that best performs for me is something less that 19" wide with a full size keyboard. 10 key isn’t really needed. A flip out or center mounted trackball seems to work better than the nipple pointer or the touch pad IMO. Keep the screen 4:3 and honestly, one that was a portrait mode screen would help with IT tasks more than a wide screen will.
Not too long ago we all setup mini computers and mainframes with all the data, apps, everything hosted on remote systems. Then came the personal computer and we were able to have our files on our machine. Install applications that we liked rather than what was on the server. It was a revolution. Now we are moving back to the old way again and it just makes no sense for anyone but a small business to pay someone else to host all of their business data.
There is no cloud, it’s just someone else’s computer.
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A lot of professions are going to make you cry, I guess.
I don’t mean the enthusiasm for the nipple nub—whatever pointer points for you is fine, right? I’m not a fan, but I’m barely a fan of the trackpad, so I get it.
But keyboards are merely one kind of input device. Others exist for good reasons.
Yeah. I prefer to keep my data for the most part where only I can destroy it and not the internet at large.
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I replaced all the key caps on my keyboard at work with clear ones to discourage anybody else from using it.
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I’ve a similar mouse to that one (the wireless G903) which has removable side-panels, so you can have the extra buttons on the left or the right. Or on both sides, but I don’t think my fingers could really handle that.
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Oblig. XKCD
(Arg. Ninja-by @jerwin; I swear that wasn’t there when I checked…)
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I’m honestly a trifle puzzled at how empty the genre is. There are a few Displaylink-based USB monitors(impressive that they managed to fit them into the power budget of USB; but useless for preboot or anything where installing the Displaylink drivers isn’t acceptable); but if you want keyboard+video+mouse in a portable package it’s pretty much crickets; despite the fact that you are basically just asking someone to reuse a laptop clamshell but omit most of the expensive parts. Plenty of 1U keyboard+video+mouse combos; but those are minimally portable and tend to abjectly suck(especially the pointing device; but often the keyboard as well) for how much they cost.
That’s why I ended up modding the lapdock. It’s not optimal but the field is just so empty:
The connectors are weird by default because it was supposed to connect to specific phones; but if you rewire the little ‘shelf’ thing you get a ~12in clamshell with 1366x768 display(HDMI in, have to keep around a VGA->HDMI converter for that) and a keyboard and trackpad that show up as USB HID devices on whatever it is connected to via USB. Plus enough internal battery to give you at least a couple hours off the wall (not sure how long the runtime was originally, I purchased a few display models with some years in them).
Not something I’d want to do real work on for any length of time; but there aren’t a lot of options if you want to crash-cart/network configure something with a battery-powered device you can slip into a laptop bag.
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I’m typing this on a ThinkPad with a trackpoint (in addition to the trackpad), (but it wasn’t a driving requirement for this laptop purchase) - it’s rarely useful for me, but I like the fact that it’s there - and moreover support the idea of a greater diversity of input methods in general. The notion that there is some exclusivity or competition between input modes seems odd. In my usage the trackpoint definitely is slower to reach a point an arbitrary distance from present cursor location, (it has a sort of fixed acceleration quality, which - while quick - doesn’t match the swiftness of a quick swipe on a trackpad). But I’m sure that for some users that is counterbalanced by the overall time saved in moving back and forth from the keypad.
It’s kind of astonishing how resilient the cursor model has been, relatively unchanged since the original Xerox PARC demo. We could have more axis/points of control - but in the windowing GUI modality it seems that they aren’t that necessary. (using Google Earth with a SpaceMouse is an awesome experience though I will say).
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