h a l f b a k e r yWhy did I think of that?
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Imagine a regular laptop, but instead of housing the cpu, keyboard,monitor and stuff between solid plastic, replace it with solid color/transparent silicon.
So, you drop it and nothing will happen to the delicate parts. And it will be a lot cheaper than the current offer, the toughbook.
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I think you need to do a lot more than that. There should be no moving parts at all and the display should not be hinged. Even the keys should be flat, and there should be no hard drive. |
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Good points nineteenthly. |
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Silicone! yes xaviergisz, thanks. |
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The Idea is taking components alredy in stock for laps, have a litle plastic reinforcement for the motherboard in order that doesen't bend too much... the idea is having a cheap rubber laptop.
Might even be waterproof this way |
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The screen's the problem here. Actually there are lots of problems, but the basic idea isn't quite as silly as it sounds. |
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The basic idea isn't silly at all. The problem is that since the mid-'eighties onwards, a decision to make laptops fragile seems to have been made. You could drop a Tandy 100 from above your head onto a concrete floor and it would be completely unscathed, and it wasn't even designed to be tough. Then there was the Husky, which was actually supposed to be used in harsh environments. Why this Thinkpad is not designed to be fired out of a cannon into an array of red hot titanium carbide spikes at point blank range i'll never know. I thought technology was supposed to improve over time. Silly me. |
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nineteenthly- you are the voice, and you are right right. Tech shoud be sturdier and cheaper. |
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He-he, thanks. IT progress seems to involve ergonomics and processing speed and power as opposed to durability and build quality. Why have we decided that's progress and the other thing isn't? I've just replaced a cruddy new keyboard on the desktop PC with an old one from an expensive PC which had, however, been thrown out because of its apparent obsolescence. Result: one super-super keyboard from the point of view of the quality of build. But apparently people would prefer a flimsy excuse for an input device where the paint comes off the keys after a couple of months just because it's got blue LEDs. |
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i see this working for everything but the screen. In fact, the ruggedized laptops (well, the one i opened once, an old toughbook) encase their components in silicone. The problem with encasing it in silicone alone is that not every drop lands the laptop on a flat surface. sometimes there is an edge, or worse, a spike. There needs to be some hard layer to spread the local forces here. |
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The components are available rugged enough to work without this hard shell, nowadays ( flexible keyboard, SSDs have their own shell, mainboard could be hidden between other components, etc.) but the screen is still a thin, rigid plate, and will break if any local force is applied - thus, it still needs a hard shell, and a soft layer below that. |
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Also, the ' do not spread the force, spread the article' -approach seems to work, too. I recently dropped my FSC laptop, it disintegrated, but worked fine after reassembly... |
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Well that's thinking outside the box if anything is.
I can think of at least two possible approaches here. One is to make the whole computer out of gel, components and all, or at least to jellify to the max. I also can't help thinking that if i dropped a squid, it wouldn't shatter unless it was frozen, the point being that they effectively have displays in their skins, so electronic paper in gel form would be suitable there. The other is to make the whole computer on a single wafer of silicon and embed it in siliconE.
I would therefore suggest a combined approach to this: make the whole lot from a single sheet which is elastic and reduce the size of the components which have to be rigid to a minimum, then embed the whole lot in slime.
Or some kind of non-Newtonian fluid, but for the life of me i can't think what that might be. |
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Well, you're a correct pothead too, i think, and since i haven't indulged the weed for yonks that would suggest that, well, that i agree with you. What's not quite clear to me is the difference between computer cultivation and computer natural selection. Maybe it's more about the situation for computers being softer nowadays because everyone thinks they want one whereas in the past they were just blinkenlights and not for gefingerpoken, and nobody knew what they were. |
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How about this: Nanosilicone tubes filled with mercury or some liquid conductor- |
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the screen could be encased on sturdy resin, as well as other fragile components,and unified by the silicone. I actually envision the laptop with the silicone keys embeeded, and when it folds could be used as a cushion to rest the head when you smoke weed liying comfortably on the floor while watching the night sky. |
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mp3 function working with "gravitational pull versus a desire for an acquatic life" from SOTL |
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Computers have gotten more fragile because they used to be just a few big components with more room for error. Now the entire case is filled with hundreds of tiny components, so the parts have to be made smaller, and less resiliant. |
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The problem I see with this idea is cooling. Silicone happens to be a great insulator and this thing would probably burn from the inside out. However I think it's a great use for Troy Hurtubise's kevlar foam. Slightly bulkier but it would be light, and maybe bulletproof. |
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Computers have in part become more fragile because they have become cheaper. We often forget just how expensive that tough, rugged old gear was. You can still find durable ruggedised equipment, but you'll pay the equivalent of inflation-adjusted 1985 prices for it. |
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[noyola], you do know you can edit the idea's title, subtitle, and
body text to correct the word usage, right? You don't even have to
click anything to go to the edit form; it's already open on this page. |
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Your what? The only FSC I know is the Forest Stewardship Council,
but I can't imagine them producing a laptop made of paper, much
less one that could easily be reassembled after being smashed.
Google didn't find any likely meanings either. |
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The new Thinkpads are made out of paper, perhaps in honor of their name. They remain quite expensive but nowadays if you hold one by the corner it will actually droop, as I think anything metallic has been banned in its construction. |
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// The new Thinkpads are made out of paper // |
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Google does not confirm, not even once I understand that
that's a figure of speech. However, sitting around at
Protospace since an unidentified person dropped it off a
couple of months ago is an Allen-Bradley Bulletin 1700
terminal, also not findable using Google (though things by
the same name that are not terminals come up), which
happens to have what appears to be a crudely hand-drawn
paper keyboard built into it in front of the screen. |
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