cowabunga

I had the same problem with the Apple mouse. The two AA batteries lasted about a month at best.

I've had the M185 for 9 months now and it's still got the original single AA battery in it! I threw a single AA in my bag in a ziplock in case of emergencies.

I wouldn't go back to wires after that mouse.

I have back/forward keys on my keyboard and tend to use them instead of the mouse.

http://bigv.io/ (bytemark) support FreeBSD no problems at all.

Edit: you just select "none" as the OS and point it at a FreeBSD 10 amd64 image URL as the CD image and it'll install fine and use virtio drivers for network/storage. Very reliable as well.

I had a serious Mac typing problem. I had a T61 and got seduced by a 2011 MBP. Liked it for about 3 months and then realised I couldn't type properly on it and that it was knackering my productivity. Also as I'm in the UK, the keyboard map is totally unlike other UK keyboard which makes it difficult to move to and from other machines and use remote desktop software.

Back on an X201 and life is good.

My wife still uses the 2011 MBP and hates it for typing on as well but she doesn't like black laptops, so her funeral!

Ex Mac user and now ThinkPad user here.

The MBP pad makes my fingers sore after a couple of hours as the surface is slightly abrasive. The Apple wireless mouse thing nips my fingers when I press it giving me sore fingers plus it weighs and ton and the gestures make my wrist hurt. The ThinkPad nipple mouse works pretty well as it's in the home row but my hands ache after a couple of hours. The trackpad on the ThinkPad X201 I use is tiny and useless so I turned it off.

Solutions for me:

1. I bought a Logitech M185 wireless mouse for £8. I am happier than I've ever been with this. It's orders of magnitude better than any other mouse I've used.

2. I use Windows and the keyboard where possible. It's really easy to drive windows from the keyboard entirely unlike OSX which requires this dude's hands: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkyZGZRnQb4 ... plus the editing system is inconsistent and wonky in some OSX apps.

Yes forget about the new features. Buy a wireless mouse and use the thinkpad's wonderful keyboard more.

That worked for me and yes I did feel like I had a degenerative neuromuscular disease as well!

I'm no major fan of the Microsoft stack but this is false.

1. You don't have to buy every version. We just got rid of Windows Server 2008 and moved to 2012 R2. We have 5 Windows 2003 Servers that are still supported hanging on until next year.

2. You can hire Visual Studio per month so scaling the team up and down is cheap and easy. Also 100% honestly, VS is pretty cheap compared to the cost of staff and kit. In fact we use VL (renting software) so we get any version we want of any dev tool, server platform etc.

3. It's fairly easy managing 100+ (well 154 but close enough) Windows machines. We do it fine with two guys and a network monkey. Powershell DSC and they are quite scriptable and easy to deploy these days. We build WIM files.

4. You shouldn't plan to add RAM or cores on the fly. Stick a duff RAM stick in and what happens? Scale up/down in/out: depends who you host with.

The official way of doing this is to buy the CD set in which the code and keys are sent via different channels. You buy the CD set and it is mailed to you. You then verify that against the key on the web site.

If the verification fails, either the CD set or the key is compromised.

I really wouldn't trust a CA or shared PKI to do this to be honest as that means you have to trust three or more parties rather than just two.

Which is why I unplugged the microphone and webcam on mine (Lenovo X201).

Having developed software for point of delivery (similar market and devices) on Windows CE approximately 6-10 years ago, I would suggest that they did indeed pick the best solution to the problem now.

The symbol/intermec handhelds are expensive, terribly unreliable, slow, require a lot of maintenance and are terribly fiddly especially for people with gloves on (as you'd expect in the freezer department in Morrisons). As for the software development side of things, you're pretty much limited to a subset of win32 that isn't very pleasant to use or a mobile CLR which is so incredibly slow it makes you want to hang yourselves. Then there's the incredible deathly pain of deploying the code to all those devices.

It took us three years to deliver a point of delivery system with the same staffing level with much smaller scope which was simply signing for stuff and listing a delivery schedule. The integration was done by a third party - we just passed messages back and forth.

They did a damn good job at TW on this one if you ask me.