Tablet PC Advice – What do you like?

I’m considering buying a Tablet PC to use in my MBA classes. I find that I’m carrying a leather legal pad / folder thing around with me everywhere, and I wish I could just carry a tablet instead because it would make taking notes so much easier…plus, I bought a laptop last semester because it was on sale and I needed one at the time knowing that it might not be good enough for what I wanted to do…well, turns out it really isn’t all that great. It overheats quite bad (it’s an HP…apparently these just do that…moreso than other laptops at least), it’s pretty slow (Athlon Mobile proc…slower than my desktop that is 5 years old now when I run the laptop off battery power…and it’s set on maximum speed). Anyway, I know several people here use Tablet PCs, so what do you guys (and gals) like? I am looking for something with a fairly long battery life and it needs to be convertable so I can use a keyboard when coding. I don’t care about a DVD burner, top of the line graphics, etc, but I need it to be fast and to last for at least the next two years without having to do many upgrades.

Space…here we come!

Well, SpaceShipOne made it back to Earth now… If you don’t know what SpaceShipOne is, it is a privately build spaceship and it launched this morning, hit an altitude of 100km (the edge of space), and then came back down. This whole thing is being done in competition for the X-Prize. Looks like SpaceShipOne’s team will be the winners…they just have to relaunch and land safely again within 2 weeks of today and then they will have $10 Million more to play with. 🙂

More info on SpaceShipOne’s launch is here: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5261571/?GT1=3584

And more info on the X-Prize is here: http://www.xprize.org/ (NOTE: This link seems a bit slow…probably since the majority of the world is not realizing there was such a thing as the X-Prize and want to check it out.)

UPDATE: As Alfred pointed out, this was not an official attempt at the X-Prize. They weren’t trying for the prize, only for space…once they try, they will also have to have the weight of two passengers on board (either as real people OR equivalent weight of two average people). Still interesting to see and they are still as close as anyone has come towards the X-Prize in any event.

What's a Wiki?

Recently I started working to build a wiki using C# & SQL Server. It turns out, such a task is quite easy, at least up until this point (pulling text from the database, wikifying it and then displaying it)…but I started thinking about something… How many of you out there even know what a “wiki” is? And of those of you that do know what it is, do you use one?

For those who don’t know, a wiki is basically a knowledge base (at least the ones I’ve seen are) where everyone can create, edit, and delete content. Think MSDN, but without “official” editors, layout people etc, where if you saw a mistake in an article, you could just go in and change it right then (sometimes without even being logged in) and then it’s all up to date and correct instead of having to resubmit the whole article etc. and without having to make the author of the original text come back and fix things later. I’m not sure I’m explaining that very clearly, so the best thing you can do if you want to know about about them is to check out the best known wiki, the Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

That wiki is an online encyclopedia that all the readers are helping to build. It’s really quite nice…notice the “edit” link at the top of all the pages…you can actually just go in there and make whatever changes you think are needed…pretty nifty idea huh?

If you want to know all about wikis in general, check out the “wiki” entry of Wikipedia here.