Fumbling around with the Laptop
Apr 29th, 2008 by trevelyan
Not exactly working late at the office, but am reluctant to leave as my new Ubuntu-powered Fujitsu ultraportable (S6410) tears through:
- downloading 400 MB of java tools and resources for generating the Chinese Perakun plugin.
- downloading 600 MB of a bilingual english-german corpus from http://statmt.org
- downloading 300 MB worth of open source flight simulation software from a Ubuntu mirror
- generating an English language model with SRILM for SMT work
It’s been about a month since I purchased the new laptop and I’m pleased with it (not to mention the new office bandwidth - I’m getting a sustained 200kbps from http://statmt.org on a 600MB file hosted somewhere in the United States). There are minor compatibility issues with Ubuntu and the keyboard that keep me from totally recommending it. The most irritating is that applications occasionally stop recognizing keyboard input when other windows open and I have to shuffle around closing things until I can type again.
Still, the most surprising thing I’ve found since buying this machine is how rarely I switch into Vista and how quickly - once there - I start chafing at the lack of productive software tools. It seems that whenever I’m in Vista I need to throw myself through hoops downloading and installing software. Was it always this much trouble? Or have I just become more reliant on a wider range of software? I’m still stunned that Vista doesn’t include a codec capable of DVD playback by default and that Fujitsu didn’t bother to install it by default. Between Apple’s momentum with mobile devices, Ubuntu’s ease-of-use with apt-get and Microsoft’s attempts to flagellate me with Vista (which often goes unresponsive for non-trivial pauses while it “thinks” about God-knows-what) and Microsoft Office 2007, I ‘m happy to be out.
Why doesn’t Microsoft run a software repository anyway?
