Over the last few weeks I have been blogging and podcasting about my Acer Aspire One A110L (sold in the UK as the A110-ab) with which I am more than satisfied and which has revolutionised my work because I no longer take a 15″ laptop with me, just to setup a router or access point.

Before I purchased the Acer model, I was originally thinking about buying an Asus Eee PC.  Both are, or at least were, available with Linux and so it was really a matter of which one was easier to configure for UMTS and other software that I wanted to use.  Taking a 8,9″ computer weighing about 900g with me to an appointment makes a big difference.  Plus the Linux version boots a lot quicker than the older Windows laptop.

A couple of weeks ago I attended the Asus roadshow in Frankfurt and was shown the new models that will be appearing in the coming months, and it appears that these smaller laptops will be getting bigger - with 10″ or even 12″ displays.  Asus obviously believes that this is the way forward, as they have now announced that they will be phasing out the 8,9″ versions of the Eee PC this year.

Whilst I can understand the need for a 12″ version to offer an alternative to the more expensive high-end 12″ laptops, I think it is a mistake to give up the format that made this type of computer so successful.

Interesting links:

1. If you don’t know what a Gravatar is, find out at Keys Corner.  I haven’t activated them on this site (yet), but do use them on new sites that I install.
2. Swedish courts are going to decide whether it is an infringement of Copyright to tell other people where files that are in themselves infringements can be downloaded.  Will this have a knock-on effect for people who include YouTube videos on their site, that are also potentially copyrighted and have been uploaded illegally?
3. I new word in the world of IT vocabulary: Clickjacking.  Find out what that is at TheRegister.

Have you ever wondered which top-level domain another planet would have if it were to be collonised?  Or, for that matter, does the International Space Station have one?

Would all domain names get longer, to become eg. www.cymeradwyo.net.earth?

To be honest, that probably not the World’s biggest problem at the moment, but if it was there would be one problem that would have to be solved first.  How do you get the internet protocols to work over large distances?

With large, I mean L A R G E - light years, for example.

At the moment, if you send an e-mail around the globe, say from the UK to Australia, then it is broken up into small chunks called “packets” and routed between various internet nodes to get there.  Not all of the message necessary goes the same way, the packets are put back together in the right order when they arrive.

Of course, this all happens very fast and you probably don’t even notice it.  But with larger distances you might still be waiting for one part to arrive.

This problem has, apparently, now been solved - as the BBC News website reported.  It all sounds very simple, storing the data until the next node can be contacted.  But it does present us with two rather important questions:

- how much data is a node likely to have to store?

- if that is the future, what do internet nodes do at the moment if they cannot relay the data?  Do they just throw it away?