I've been considering that; built-in CF SSD, and maybe a large capacity external USB drive (5400rpm laptop HDD in a "icydock" screwless holder). The internal would be fast, hold my OS, be enough for everday tasks, and the external could be for my media storage. This would probably improve battery life as well. I seem to recall that Linux gets significantly worse battery life than OS X on Mac hardware, not quite sure why, probably keeping more things active on average due to lower hw/sw coupling.
A friend says:
Heard great things about system76 and I like the fact they offer matte screen options over the usual shiny pieces. I am not a fan of core and intel gma in general. Upper echelon corei7 do very well though because of
all the cache they pack in there. Have you considered something like Lenovo x120? Though not a big performer, would likely get you buy and supports 1080p resolution (even on 12" models). I really dont like the resolutions on system76 systems I see (768 vertical really does affect your view space). I am currently looking at e450 models from Lenovo (130e), Asus, Dell (the only one that bundles w/ Ubuntu out of the factory), or Acer (preferred).
Again, after my experiences with Asus, I'm hesitating to buy from anyone who will ignore any problems on Linux using the excuse that it is Linux. It needs to have all driver software in the Linux tree or it didn't happen. :-)
I had a great experience with system76. I got a 15" pangolin with a 1600x? screen, it was a special offer for a while. My only complaint, and the only consistent complaint I saw on the system76 forums, was really poor battery life.
Right now I'm struggling with it on a Macbook Pro 2.1... and it won't boot off HDD (I have to boot to CD then HDD), and some package I'm installing is messing up fonts/icons, so I have to troubleshoot that.
Primary distro is Ubuntu but I'd consider Mint if the advantages were truly compelling enough for me to retest/rewrite my kickstart scripts.
Every time I mention laptop flakiness under Linux, I get called stupid or lazy by some Linux advocate who denies any such problems exist. After I point them at those pages, they generally disappear quietly, without an apology. These same people see to be unable to fix any of these problem I've extensively documented, so I've grown less convinced of my own laziness and stupidity.
Maybe I'm just picky, since I want my hardware to work the way I naively expect; I don't want to have to "work around" bugs. That's why I got into writing software, and why I prefer Linux _in the first place_.
I'd check the Ubuntu fora but the laptop reports are not done by many people; it's a bit sparse. In fact, so is the Linux Hardware Compatibility List. Which is a shame.
For a bunch of DIY hackers, I'm sort of surprised you guys are so willing to hand your money and control over its security over to the government and financial institutions. Then again, I was a computer security guy for the government and online financial institutions, so I guess I'm comfortable with my ability to protect my (very very small amount of) money, or I'm just more cynical about them.
Western Union is irreversible, and would probably have been shut down if it wasn't so well-established. Most other US payment systems are reversible, which is why you have holds on getting the money out of those systems - they want time to detect fraud and reverse the fraudulent transaction. This requirement for reversibility seeps through the system, which makes anonymity very difficult, and causes a lot of friction on anything that changes a reversible payment into a non-reversible payment, since that's where you eat the fraud. Now you know why it's hard to get cash equivalents out of the system, especially to a remote party.
The point here is that once the money is in a non-reversible network, you can accept a payment and know that it's good very very quickly. If you make bitcoin reversible, you might as well just use one of the old payment systems, where the money might disappear later (and you'll be out your privacy, goods, cash and services), or you'll be paying transaction fees based on your charge-back rates, and unable to charge more for the reversible payments than the non-reversible ones due to contracts you have to sign to be part of the payment network - and thus the non-reversible payers subsidize the reversible payers. What a racket.
As we used to say, "there's no good guys in payment processing, only bad guys and less-bad guys".
