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Unread 05-12-2010, 22:08
Radical Pi Radical Pi is offline
Putting the Jumper in the Bumper
AKA: Ian Thompson
FRC #0639 (Code Red Robotics)
Team Role: Programmer
 
Join Date: Jan 2010
Rookie Year: 2010
Location: New York
Posts: 655
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Re: What is Classmate

Quote:
Originally Posted by linuxboy View Post
Hmm, sounds like everyone thinks that the classmate is too small/slow for programming, that is kind of worrying. I guess I will see what my team can do in terms of a bigger better laptop (if only a Mac was within budget *sigh*). Maybe we can borrow someones extra desktop since I think some people have extra computers lying around. Anybody have any experience with having one of the team members bring in a desktop for programming and leaving it there? Are there benefits to having a laptop during build season or is it just so the programmers can work at home?
I can't say anything about keeping a desktop for programming, but our web team had a *very* expensive desktop sitting in our build room (also a classroom) for the entire build season and nothing bad happened to it.

Personally I would take a laptop for this kind of thing over a desktop any day just because of the portability. Many runs across the school for robot testing were avoided because the robot could be reprogrammed at our test area.

I wouldn't really worry about finding a "good" laptop for programming from. Last year we had two programmers. I worked off of the classmate, didn't really have any trouble there (except for having to find that stupid misplaced semicolon on the keyboard). The other (lead) programmer worked off of an old laptop which I think had a pentium 3 processor in it (about 1 GHz), and aside from the occasional lag when 3 programs tried to open at the same time, it worked fairly well. The software we're given will work with almost anything you throw at it, so don't stress out if you can't find a high-quality laptop.
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