Finally a laptop built for the rugged, style-conscious narcissist in me.
You joke, but methanol powered fuel-cell laptops were created some time ago. Can’t take them on planes though…
Are you serious? I didn’t see any smiley’s in your post.
Is that a combustion drive?
Yeah I’m serious, there’s no combustion per se, a fuel cell converts fuel to electricity by a chemical process. There’s a good photo around of GWB using a methanol fuel-cell powered cell phone. Infact here.
it is
…like this? Hummer snaps a tie rod
Probably not the best comparison one could make, but whatever, it’s just more marketing crap.
A truly “go-anywhere” laptop would be water & dustproof, have no moving parts, and be able to withstand most any impact (including the screen)… not this sissy “30 inch drop test” business they’re spouting. I wanna see the screen pelted with fist-sized hunks of granite and come out unscathed.
That’s not really fair, the Hummer was never intended to be driven outside of the suburbs…
That’s a good point, that’s only just equivalent to pushing it off a desk. Also I bet that’s only when the disk isn’t running, it would be a lot more fragile when it was. A laptop with no moving parts is an interesting idea, replacing the hardrive with RAM wouldn’t be impossible, but the cooling without fans would be. Of course the fans are much more robust than the hardrive so you could probably get away with having them in some pretty harsh circumstances.
WOW. 30" That’s rugged. That means if it gets knocked off a chair it won’t break. You’ll be ok as long as you don’t put it on your desk or anything dumb like that.
And then there’s the power and performance which truely lives up to what you’d expect from a Hummer. 1.8 GHz, 512 MB ram and 80GB harddisk! Not many years ago that was unbelievable specs for a labtop.
It costs 3 times as much as laptops with comparable features, but they don’t have the word HUMMER printed on them in a large rugged font.
It even features a hard handle. Hard enough to handle the powerful grip of the powerful, rugged individuals who buy this type of product.
Like a lumberjack. This is a lumberjack’s laptop.
IBM laptops have an accelerometer so that they can tell when they’re dropping and - in theory - park the hard drive. I’ve not seen any experiments into whether this actually works in practice but it’s certainly cool.
A side effect of this was the ability to play some games by tilting the laptop 
Using normal RAM might be a bit tricky, but flash memory would work… I think there are a few companies actually planning to put hard driveless laptops on the market in the nearish future, using flash for all their storage. This should save on weight and size, and probably power consumption too.
Yes, I should think so. But using careful design, a lower power CPU and graphics chipset and using exotic little tricks like heat pipes to get the heat out of the case, it should be possible to design a laptop with few or no fans. A tiny, ultra light, long battery life, silent fully functional computer. Wouldn’t that be cool 
Desks are 30" high. Probably the most common types of impacts for laptops are being dropped, either off a desk (or lap), or while walking around with it. Hopefully most of the walking is done with the thing in a padded case, but sometimes I walk around the house with mine open and running.
Note: I’m always conscious of my cord if it’s stretched across anyplace people can go. The newer Mac laptops have an ingenious magnetic power plug. rather than knocking the computer to the floor, if someone trips over one of those cords it just pops off the side of the laptop. Brilliant!
Apple laptops now also have the HD parking accelerometer, detecting freefall and parking the drive. It works as good as airbags; in other words it does stop the drive pretty quick. No guarantees about other possible damage to the system.
Also my 2003 Powerbook runs most of the time without the fan on. It’s very quiet, but it also gets pretty warm if you actually use it on your lap. The only times the fan runs full speed is when I’m crunching lots of files in Photoshop, or when something is frozen and it gets stuck in a loop. A whirring fan, when I’m not doing anything, tells me something’s wrong, usually remedied by closing applications.
way to premote global warming!! what a stupid thing to invent, with all the problems were alredy having with poluting the atmosphere
Does this laptop come with a built in spell-checker?
I’m with you all the way.
I think you missed the point, this is just a normal laptop in a ‘rugged’ case and Hummer branding, it has absaloutely nothing to do with global warming. Please actually read the thread and check the link before flaming next time.
As for fuel cell laptops, the point is they are far more energy efficient than a conventional electric laptop. Also the transport energy costs are lowered as shipping methanol is reckoned to require less energy than pumping electricity through cables to charge your battery, and you avoid the inefficiency of battery charging (think how hot they get). Ah the wonders of microgeneration.
Mark, loving the parking accelerometre, what a great idea. I’ll take your word on it on the RAM vs. flash debate, as I’m only vaguely aware of the difference. As for cooling, I don’t know if you could use the Joule-Peltier effect plus some convection to cool components, it’s the simplest thing in the world and works well in my fridge.
And I can’t do a simple inch-centimeter conversion :o
You can convert your laptop youself if you’re willing to pay more $ per megabyte.
[quote=“kington99”]
Mark, loving the parking accelerometre, what a great idea. I’ll take your word on it on the RAM vs. flash debate, as I’m only vaguely aware of the difference.
[QUOTE]
It’s the usual price/density/performance/power tradeoff again: flash is denser physically, cheaper per MB, uses less power, and is slower than RAM. It’s also nonvolatile so you don’t lose the data if the power fails.
RAM uses fairly sane electronic principles - relatively unscary. Flash uses some bizarre quantum physics that very few people really understand: ISTR it involving quantum tunnelling electrons through insulator into places they couldn’t otherwise get to. Then they stay there for a long time because … well if they shouldn’t have been able to get in there, they definitely can’t get out.
No idea how you read it though, and my explanation is probably enough to make grown physicists weep, so you may not want to repeat it to anybody who knows what they’re talking about 
I seem to recall Peltier devices not being very power efficient, but there was some interesting article doing the rounds recently about some company that had invented something that essentially did the same job but more efficiently.
Heat pipes are a cute way of doing this sort of thing… Essentially it’s … a pipe … from the CPU heatsink to the outside of the case / to a fan. And, IIRC, it’s full of some kind of volatile liquid which evaporates at the CPU end and carries the heat to the outside of the case, where it condenses again and runs back. Something like that, anyhow - I don’t really understand it, but it’s very clever, and it moves the heat without actually requiring any active parts. My laptop connects the heatpipe to a fan, but I think some of the Apple Powerbooks didn’t even need a fan to dissipate the heat…