Sometimes I wonder how it is that so many people on a supposedly tech oriented site have apparently no understanding of how technology works.
Breaking through huge layers of ice is a totally different task than firing a rocket at another planet. We could be really good at one and really bad at another.
polluting the air and water with hundreds of thousands of chemicals,
Credibility dropped here, as you fell off the deep end; your claims went from "sort of vague" to "downright hysterical". Every time I hear someone use the word "chemicals" in such a fear-mongering way, I wonder whether they are aware that water is a chemical too, or that its the worlds biggest fear-word. Oh no, chemicals, theyre so bad for you -- except for all of the ones necessary to support life.
Which specific extinction are you referring to, by the way? There are a number of species which are being removed from the endangered list as they are making a comeback (eagles for one), so that its pretty hard to swallow claim that we're in the middle of the biggest extinction event in the last epoch, especially given how vague and handwavy your whole post is.
That is not correct. AVs at least in theory do a number of things:
* If you must use an outdated runtime (java etc), the AV will protect you from known attack signatures.
* If there is a zeroday out there, AV provides another layer of security which may detect that zeroday by heuristics. For this, it is important NOT to be using a McAntivirus (norton, mcafee, Security Essentials).
* Some provide sandboxing around various programs (Office, browser, PDF), further mitigating buffer overflows, exploits, etc
* Even if a virus manages to get past the AV, it is VERY common for the AV to throw up warnings, alerting the user that action is needed.
Cleaning existing infections is basically the last reason you would use an AV.
and there's always the risk of the service shutting down without notice
This is much less likely than that the user forgets to backup. Cloud systems generally provide email notifications, and the user would be alerted if such a system were going to shut down (at the very least, by error messages, emails, and credit statements). I have not once run into an issue with a cloud provider shutting down.
Additionally, CrashPlan allows you to purchase an enterprise license which basically lets you run the "cloud backup" on your server. Doesnt matter if the parent company shuts down, once activated the server should keep rolling.
3) Privacy is the issue with guest accounts for me.
No currently produced OS would allow one non-root user to access another user's data, or install anything (drivers) that might interact with another user. If youre concerned with what they might do online thats another issue, but generally that shouldnt be an issue legally because it would have to be shown that it was you.
4) I've found system restore doesn't fix most issues - it's great for preserving your settings but often doesn't fix the underlying problem.
Depends what caused it. Viruses etc wont be affected; if you just installed a driver and everything blew up, it probably would fix it.
The best solution is to accept that most people do not need to worry about "NSA as an adversary". Use a passphrase as your encryption key and you are protected from subpoenas, but not bruteforces by gigantic clusters-- which is fine.
If thats not acceptable, then accept that you need a solid system in place to protect and store your encryption key.
Bittorrent Sync appears to do basically what "Live Mesh" used to do before it was canned. Is that correct? What is the performance hit? How well does it handle conflicts?
Many also allow you to do a "delete this file and all old versions". Many also allow you to mount the cloud space as a local drive. Some may present past versions as shadow copies.
The more features a cloud-sync service has, the worse it will tend to be for backing up. Use a cloud backup system if you want to, but dont confuse backup and syncing. Rsync is not a backup, RAID 1 is not a backup, why would anyone assume "cloud mirror" is a backup?
That depends, mostly on what system you are using, and whether its a backup or a sync. Most backup systems use versioning, and many specify old versions as unwriteable. For those, the most recent copies would be bad, but you would have good backups until the retention period passed-- at some point all of your stored versions will be the bad copy. If you're using a simple full-backup with X copies system, that retention period will pass pretty quick, possibly before you realize you got hit.
For syncing programs (google drive, aerofs, skydrive), it again depends on which one. These tend to be designed to exactly mirror what you have locally, so its very possible that you will lose your "backup"-- Rsync, for example, would hose any good copies you have as soon as it ran. Some do have versioning systems, but many allow complete deletion of files / all versions-- so if a user were to delete said ransomware'd file, he might be killing his "backup".
These also tend to run their syncs in real time, which is why they ARENT BACKUPS. Its also why Bennett's advice as worded is exceptionally poor: Google drive is great for syncing, and awful for backups.
An extra $1000 just so I dont have to spend 2 hours once a year cleaning it is a pretty tough pill to swallow. Not sure how much you get paid but my salary isnt that high.
Run your coax thru the surge protector. Electricity doesnt really care what sort of a line its going through; copper is copper. Itll travel thru a coax, to a modem, out through an ethernet line, just as easily as through a wall wart.
Best: Use a cloud backup system, specify your own encryption key, specify your main USB drive as backup 1, the cloud as backup 2, and your NAS as backup 3. Set up your cloud provider to email you when stuff breaks.
Oh look, now you dont have to spend all of your time swapping stuff into your safety deposit box, or hardcopying everything to an offsite location.
Good techies have realised that telling your average user to use USB drives for backup is the same as telling them "dont worry about it, you can start over when you have a drive failure". The number of times Ive been asked to help with a recovery, and the local backup was screwed / non-existent, is unbelievable. A number of times the user was convinced they had a backup.
One of the biggest pros for cloud backups is that they tend to alert you via email when something goes wrong. Theres not really a practical way to do that locally: setting up an SMTP service for daily reporting will just cause the user to filter them out, and relying on it just for emergencies assumes that its still up and running after X many years with no maintenance or monitoring.
I really feel like 80% of techies are only good when you stick them in a server room, and awful with end-users because they have no idea how actual real people go about their lives, and how important "works" and "dont have to spend time on it" are.
While Bennett's advice is pretty poor, your response isnt much better. 1) Either way your system has to perform heuristics (or it will be worthless vs new viruses), and has to hash the file to send to "the cloud". I suspect that the whole "cloud backup" thing is a bunch of marketing crap; im sure there are some benefits, but today's processors are remarkably good at the sort of stuff AV does, and a good AV (NOT SYMANTEC / MCAFEE) will not chew up all of your resources.
I also thought your #2 point was railing against "the cloud"?
2) Cloud backup systems can be execellent. Some allow you to specify both a local and a cloud backup-- this is basically the only economical / realistic way for an end-user to get off-site backups. Keep in mind that just because YOUR full-time job involves rotating tapes to an offsite vault doesnt mean that a full-time professor has the same time to devote to that. The system I use, for example, allows "mesh" backups to all devices on my account (using their local storage), allows using my own encryption key, and encrypts blocks prior to sending across the wire (rather than using SSL, and trusting the provider to encrypt). Id be interested to see what your objection to that is.
3) Non admin accounts are fine to protect against user carelessness, and if youre really worried about a friend doing hardware / BIOS shenanigans, you need new friends. I let a roommate use my laptop for a final a few weeks back (OSX didnt allow the exam software to install), and it wasnt a big deal: if anything happened, I have backups and can wipe the thing. People are a lot more important than my laptop.
4) my past experience with system restore has tended to be pretty bad, but I would say 2 things: 1), system refresh blows everything away, so theres basically NO reason not to try a restore first; 2), Installing hyper-V caused my Win8 box to become unbootable (driver conflict). System Restore is designed EXACTLY for that sort of scenario, and was able to get me back up and running in ~5 minutes.
Cloud is a fine backup plan, IF:
* It is NOT a mirroring / syncing system
* It has built in encryption that you can verify
* It supports diffs, and multiple versions, going back at least 60-90 days
* The company is reputable
Bennett's advice, of course, fails #1, so when you manage to corrupt your keeppass database or delete a bunch of stuff in that term paper you were working on, your cloud mirror system will happily purge the good copy of said file.
The reason I support cloud backups (with those caveats) is precisely what you said:
Maybe no one is likely to do all these
Average users that I have dealt with typically do not devote sufficient attention to computer stuff to swap out 2-3 external drives on a regular and fixed schedule-- not that I can blame them; Im sure theres a lot of accounting-related or car-related stuff that Im terribly bad at, which is why I turn to experts for those things. In the past decade that Ive been working with computers, local backups for non-business users have 90% of the time been very old, or non-existent. Some of the time the user WAS dutifully swapping drives, but the backup system didnt like the changing drive letters, or the schedule got screwed up, or the drives were full and the user didnt know how to purge old backups.
On the other hand, the users Ive set up with Crashplan have had solid backups 9/10 times. The ONE time I had an issue with crashplan was because of a bug with P2V and drive identifiers shifting. I have had issues occasionally with other cloud backup systems, usually when the provider is not reputable, but my experience with Crashplan has led me to advocate cloud backup when it is set up correctly. Sometimes these systems will allow you to specify multiple locations for the backup-- this is even better, as long as it is a fixed location. External drives, as far as Im concerned, are a no-go for end-user backups; theres just too many ways for them to screw up.
Regarding your concern with encryption, again-- many at least claim to encrypt the data (possibly with guarantees against data theft-- check each provider). While a lot of them use some variant of "data encryption key is encrypted with logon password", some will allow you to specify an encryption passphrase or even a key / keyfile. As most of my experience is with Crashplan, I can say that they offer all 3 options; the first option is of course vulnerable to a server hack + password dump, but the other two are not, and file encryption is done locally.
Hopefully I dont sound like a shill for crashplan, but my time with it vs with tape / USB drives / small NASes has led me to favor online backups for end-users 100% of the time. You have to live in the real world, and you have to use what works with real people. Cloud backup CAN be done properly, and it CAN be better than manually managed/rotated backups.
I find it kind of hillarious that an article talking about the rise and proliferation of bogus / clickbait headlines is being posted on slashdot of all things. I had sort of assumed that slashdot was where rising clickbait article writers came to cut their chops before venturing off into the blogosphere.
Dude, those coupons are available at costco as well, i JUST saw an add with the same sort of coupons. At basically any time you can get these price point comparisons-- i gave you an example from 2 years ago in march, I just gave you another one from HP.com, and I could show you yet another from Costco.
RE: the 15", a 256GB SSD is a whopping $180, if you want one; many folks would prefer the hybrid 1TB drive, which is why i tacked on that $30 upgrade. If you really insist on an SSD, up the price by $150+tax = $160. Doesnt make much difference when the Mac is $1500 more.
Screenwise, the HP is clearly inferior, but I dont think you could make anything resembling a convincing argument that its $1500-worth. its telling that you could buy an HP spectre, and the HP 15", and still spend less than that Macbook Pro.
The HP Spectre, by the way, isnt $1300. Its $1132 shipped, while the Mac is $1641 shipped-- which is the price that matters, as opposed to the one they advertise. Im not clear why anyone but marketing goons would give a hoot about the price advertised. 1641-1132=$509.
So if I go to new egg right now I can expect a $500 discount on any laptop I choose? Sweet.
No, but if you go to Newegg youll see a watch listed as retailing for $900 with 92% off, going for $80; and suprisingly that same watch is available on amazon for around that price ($150 or so). And if you were to go to HP's website right now youd find all of their laptops seem to have 20% off until 1/4/2014-- i have new pics for you: https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B9qgiyz_vguVUXEza0hBai1SdWs&usp=sharing
Its not a perfect match-- the HP Spectre handily beats the Air at $500 less, and while the HP 15" has a lower resolution, it IS touch enabled, and is better specced in almost every other way-- processor, touch enabled, wifi. The drive is a tossup, but considering we're saving $1500 by going with HP over Mac, you could probably throw in an SSD or 3 from newegg and still come out ahead.
Trying to claim Macs are cost competitive other than perhaps their Airs (depending on what year you choose) and their current Mac pro is ridiculous. I could compare the iMac to several of Asus' offerings, but I get the feeling you'd pooh-pooh that too.
There was no coupon code. Those discounts are bog-standard; vendors mark up the "retail price" but discount it. This is a fairly well established retail trick; JC Penny famously attempted to buck that trend by simply setting the price at what it should be, and they paid the price for it.
Youre really not going to convince me that half the ram, $1000 more, a slower CPU, and a slower GPU are all OK because the case is made of aluminum and a very very slightly better screen (1440 by 900 vs 1368 by 768). (SOURCE) This is the very definition of moving the goalposts: there will never be a perfect match spec / build wise, but I presented something that was clearly superior in technical specs, and $1000 cheaper, and youre ready to dismiss it by re-prioritizing the case as more important than the other specs. Meanwhile, with the Mac Pro, people have given very valid criticisms of the case (lack of expandability, inability to rack the thing, inability to upgrade), but in this case the technical specs are shouted up (which they should be-- but be consistent about it).
All you've shown here is a crappy HP laptop that made several compromises to get to $1650.
The selling price was $1150. Those coupons are handed out like candy-- I could give you ton of examples right now of coupon codes like this (check techbargains, newegg, HP's store, Dell Premier, etc). That just happened to be the best match I could find in a 30 minute span on that particular day.
Thats some kind of funny math where the advertised price is more relevant than the price you actually pay at the register, but no, the laptop cost $950 less (plus or minus for shipping) once you pay.
Aside from the excellent vendor support that powershell has (like NetApp / VMWare / Exchange / SQL / Amazon AWS etc etc), you would be out of your mind in a homogenous windows environment to scorn powershell-- especially considering it is the primary method of managing Server 2012+. What youre suggesting is like saying "screw GPOs, because theyre single vendor."
The "lockin" occurs because you have tens of thousands of workstations on one system and its very difficult to change, not because you wrote some scripts or took the time to learn a particular language. If you need to change things, learn a new language.
Slashdot Mirror
More to the point RE flight height, I believe there are laws indicating some heights at which you are still considered to be on the property below it.
I'm more in favor of not infringing on PETA's rights to harass hunters
I wasnt aware that harassment was a protected action. I was more under the impression it was illegal.
https://www.google.com/search?q=Harassment+statute
Sometimes I wonder how it is that so many people on a supposedly tech oriented site have apparently no understanding of how technology works.
Breaking through huge layers of ice is a totally different task than firing a rocket at another planet. We could be really good at one and really bad at another.
polluting the air and water with hundreds of thousands of chemicals,
Credibility dropped here, as you fell off the deep end; your claims went from "sort of vague" to "downright hysterical". Every time I hear someone use the word "chemicals" in such a fear-mongering way, I wonder whether they are aware that water is a chemical too, or that its the worlds biggest fear-word. Oh no, chemicals, theyre so bad for you -- except for all of the ones necessary to support life.
Which specific extinction are you referring to, by the way? There are a number of species which are being removed from the endangered list as they are making a comeback (eagles for one), so that its pretty hard to swallow claim that we're in the middle of the biggest extinction event in the last epoch, especially given how vague and handwavy your whole post is.
1) AV is only needed when there's a problem
That is not correct. AVs at least in theory do a number of things:
* If you must use an outdated runtime (java etc), the AV will protect you from known attack signatures.
* If there is a zeroday out there, AV provides another layer of security which may detect that zeroday by heuristics. For this, it is important NOT to be using a McAntivirus (norton, mcafee, Security Essentials).
* Some provide sandboxing around various programs (Office, browser, PDF), further mitigating buffer overflows, exploits, etc
* Even if a virus manages to get past the AV, it is VERY common for the AV to throw up warnings, alerting the user that action is needed.
Cleaning existing infections is basically the last reason you would use an AV.
and there's always the risk of the service shutting down without notice
This is much less likely than that the user forgets to backup. Cloud systems generally provide email notifications, and the user would be alerted if such a system were going to shut down (at the very least, by error messages, emails, and credit statements). I have not once run into an issue with a cloud provider shutting down.
Additionally, CrashPlan allows you to purchase an enterprise license which basically lets you run the "cloud backup" on your server. Doesnt matter if the parent company shuts down, once activated the server should keep rolling.
3) Privacy is the issue with guest accounts for me.
No currently produced OS would allow one non-root user to access another user's data, or install anything (drivers) that might interact with another user. If youre concerned with what they might do online thats another issue, but generally that shouldnt be an issue legally because it would have to be shown that it was you.
4) I've found system restore doesn't fix most issues - it's great for preserving your settings but often doesn't fix the underlying problem.
Depends what caused it. Viruses etc wont be affected; if you just installed a driver and everything blew up, it probably would fix it.
The best solution is to accept that most people do not need to worry about "NSA as an adversary". Use a passphrase as your encryption key and you are protected from subpoenas, but not bruteforces by gigantic clusters-- which is fine.
If thats not acceptable, then accept that you need a solid system in place to protect and store your encryption key.
I dont think theres an OS out there thats so annoying Id pay an extra $1000 just to get OSX.
And accessing your files / data / passwords, which everyone should know is far more important than the OS it sits on.
Bittorrent Sync appears to do basically what "Live Mesh" used to do before it was canned. Is that correct? What is the performance hit? How well does it handle conflicts?
Many also allow you to do a "delete this file and all old versions". Many also allow you to mount the cloud space as a local drive. Some may present past versions as shadow copies.
The more features a cloud-sync service has, the worse it will tend to be for backing up. Use a cloud backup system if you want to, but dont confuse backup and syncing. Rsync is not a backup, RAID 1 is not a backup, why would anyone assume "cloud mirror" is a backup?
That depends, mostly on what system you are using, and whether its a backup or a sync.
Most backup systems use versioning, and many specify old versions as unwriteable. For those, the most recent copies would be bad, but you would have good backups until the retention period passed-- at some point all of your stored versions will be the bad copy. If you're using a simple full-backup with X copies system, that retention period will pass pretty quick, possibly before you realize you got hit.
For syncing programs (google drive, aerofs, skydrive), it again depends on which one. These tend to be designed to exactly mirror what you have locally, so its very possible that you will lose your "backup"-- Rsync, for example, would hose any good copies you have as soon as it ran. Some do have versioning systems, but many allow complete deletion of files / all versions-- so if a user were to delete said ransomware'd file, he might be killing his "backup".
These also tend to run their syncs in real time, which is why they ARENT BACKUPS. Its also why Bennett's advice as worded is exceptionally poor: Google drive is great for syncing, and awful for backups.
Ive never touched encrypted bits before, are they fluffier than regular bits?
You sure its a bug? AFAIK doing anything that tinkers with boot devices will cause bitlocker to freak out and assume its being attacked.
An extra $1000 just so I dont have to spend 2 hours once a year cleaning it is a pretty tough pill to swallow. Not sure how much you get paid but my salary isnt that high.
Run your coax thru the surge protector. Electricity doesnt really care what sort of a line its going through; copper is copper. Itll travel thru a coax, to a modem, out through an ethernet line, just as easily as through a wall wart.
Best: Use a cloud backup system, specify your own encryption key, specify your main USB drive as backup 1, the cloud as backup 2, and your NAS as backup 3. Set up your cloud provider to email you when stuff breaks.
Oh look, now you dont have to spend all of your time swapping stuff into your safety deposit box, or hardcopying everything to an offsite location.
Good techies have realised that telling your average user to use USB drives for backup is the same as telling them "dont worry about it, you can start over when you have a drive failure". The number of times Ive been asked to help with a recovery, and the local backup was screwed / non-existent, is unbelievable. A number of times the user was convinced they had a backup.
One of the biggest pros for cloud backups is that they tend to alert you via email when something goes wrong. Theres not really a practical way to do that locally: setting up an SMTP service for daily reporting will just cause the user to filter them out, and relying on it just for emergencies assumes that its still up and running after X many years with no maintenance or monitoring.
I really feel like 80% of techies are only good when you stick them in a server room, and awful with end-users because they have no idea how actual real people go about their lives, and how important "works" and "dont have to spend time on it" are.
While Bennett's advice is pretty poor, your response isnt much better.
1) Either way your system has to perform heuristics (or it will be worthless vs new viruses), and has to hash the file to send to "the cloud". I suspect that the whole "cloud backup" thing is a bunch of marketing crap; im sure there are some benefits, but today's processors are remarkably good at the sort of stuff AV does, and a good AV (NOT SYMANTEC / MCAFEE) will not chew up all of your resources.
I also thought your #2 point was railing against "the cloud"?
2) Cloud backup systems can be execellent. Some allow you to specify both a local and a cloud backup-- this is basically the only economical / realistic way for an end-user to get off-site backups. Keep in mind that just because YOUR full-time job involves rotating tapes to an offsite vault doesnt mean that a full-time professor has the same time to devote to that. The system I use, for example, allows "mesh" backups to all devices on my account (using their local storage), allows using my own encryption key, and encrypts blocks prior to sending across the wire (rather than using SSL, and trusting the provider to encrypt). Id be interested to see what your objection to that is.
3) Non admin accounts are fine to protect against user carelessness, and if youre really worried about a friend doing hardware / BIOS shenanigans, you need new friends. I let a roommate use my laptop for a final a few weeks back (OSX didnt allow the exam software to install), and it wasnt a big deal: if anything happened, I have backups and can wipe the thing. People are a lot more important than my laptop.
4) my past experience with system restore has tended to be pretty bad, but I would say 2 things: 1), system refresh blows everything away, so theres basically NO reason not to try a restore first; 2), Installing hyper-V caused my Win8 box to become unbootable (driver conflict). System Restore is designed EXACTLY for that sort of scenario, and was able to get me back up and running in ~5 minutes.
Cloud is a fine backup plan, IF:
* It is NOT a mirroring / syncing system
* It has built in encryption that you can verify
* It supports diffs, and multiple versions, going back at least 60-90 days
* The company is reputable
Bennett's advice, of course, fails #1, so when you manage to corrupt your keeppass database or delete a bunch of stuff in that term paper you were working on, your cloud mirror system will happily purge the good copy of said file.
The reason I support cloud backups (with those caveats) is precisely what you said:
Maybe no one is likely to do all these
Average users that I have dealt with typically do not devote sufficient attention to computer stuff to swap out 2-3 external drives on a regular and fixed schedule-- not that I can blame them; Im sure theres a lot of accounting-related or car-related stuff that Im terribly bad at, which is why I turn to experts for those things. In the past decade that Ive been working with computers, local backups for non-business users have 90% of the time been very old, or non-existent. Some of the time the user WAS dutifully swapping drives, but the backup system didnt like the changing drive letters, or the schedule got screwed up, or the drives were full and the user didnt know how to purge old backups.
On the other hand, the users Ive set up with Crashplan have had solid backups 9/10 times. The ONE time I had an issue with crashplan was because of a bug with P2V and drive identifiers shifting. I have had issues occasionally with other cloud backup systems, usually when the provider is not reputable, but my experience with Crashplan has led me to advocate cloud backup when it is set up correctly. Sometimes these systems will allow you to specify multiple locations for the backup-- this is even better, as long as it is a fixed location. External drives, as far as Im concerned, are a no-go for end-user backups; theres just too many ways for them to screw up.
Regarding your concern with encryption, again-- many at least claim to encrypt the data (possibly with guarantees against data theft-- check each provider). While a lot of them use some variant of "data encryption key is encrypted with logon password", some will allow you to specify an encryption passphrase or even a key / keyfile. As most of my experience is with Crashplan, I can say that they offer all 3 options; the first option is of course vulnerable to a server hack + password dump, but the other two are not, and file encryption is done locally.
Hopefully I dont sound like a shill for crashplan, but my time with it vs with tape / USB drives / small NASes has led me to favor online backups for end-users 100% of the time. You have to live in the real world, and you have to use what works with real people. Cloud backup CAN be done properly, and it CAN be better than manually managed /rotated backups.
I find it kind of hillarious that an article talking about the rise and proliferation of bogus / clickbait headlines is being posted on slashdot of all things. I had sort of assumed that slashdot was where rising clickbait article writers came to cut their chops before venturing off into the blogosphere.
Dude, those coupons are available at costco as well, i JUST saw an add with the same sort of coupons. At basically any time you can get these price point comparisons-- i gave you an example from 2 years ago in march, I just gave you another one from HP.com, and I could show you yet another from Costco.
RE: the 15", a 256GB SSD is a whopping $180, if you want one; many folks would prefer the hybrid 1TB drive, which is why i tacked on that $30 upgrade. If you really insist on an SSD, up the price by $150+tax = $160. Doesnt make much difference when the Mac is $1500 more.
Screenwise, the HP is clearly inferior, but I dont think you could make anything resembling a convincing argument that its $1500-worth. its telling that you could buy an HP spectre, and the HP 15", and still spend less than that Macbook Pro.
The HP Spectre, by the way, isnt $1300. Its $1132 shipped, while the Mac is $1641 shipped-- which is the price that matters, as opposed to the one they advertise. Im not clear why anyone but marketing goons would give a hoot about the price advertised. 1641-1132=$509.
So if I go to new egg right now I can expect a $500 discount on any laptop I choose? Sweet.
No, but if you go to Newegg youll see a watch listed as retailing for $900 with 92% off, going for $80; and suprisingly that same watch is available on amazon for around that price ($150 or so). And if you were to go to HP's website right now youd find all of their laptops seem to have 20% off until 1/4/2014-- i have new pics for you:
https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B9qgiyz_vguVUXEza0hBai1SdWs&usp=sharing
Its not a perfect match-- the HP Spectre handily beats the Air at $500 less, and while the HP 15" has a lower resolution, it IS touch enabled, and is better specced in almost every other way-- processor, touch enabled, wifi. The drive is a tossup, but considering we're saving $1500 by going with HP over Mac, you could probably throw in an SSD or 3 from newegg and still come out ahead.
Trying to claim Macs are cost competitive other than perhaps their Airs (depending on what year you choose) and their current Mac pro is ridiculous. I could compare the iMac to several of Asus' offerings, but I get the feeling you'd pooh-pooh that too.
There was no coupon code. Those discounts are bog-standard; vendors mark up the "retail price" but discount it. This is a fairly well established retail trick; JC Penny famously attempted to buck that trend by simply setting the price at what it should be, and they paid the price for it.
Youre really not going to convince me that half the ram, $1000 more, a slower CPU, and a slower GPU are all OK because the case is made of aluminum and a very very slightly better screen (1440 by 900 vs 1368 by 768). (SOURCE) This is the very definition of moving the goalposts: there will never be a perfect match spec / build wise, but I presented something that was clearly superior in technical specs, and $1000 cheaper, and youre ready to dismiss it by re-prioritizing the case as more important than the other specs. Meanwhile, with the Mac Pro, people have given very valid criticisms of the case (lack of expandability, inability to rack the thing, inability to upgrade), but in this case the technical specs are shouted up (which they should be-- but be consistent about it).
All you've shown here is a crappy HP laptop that made several compromises to get to $1650.
The selling price was $1150. Those coupons are handed out like candy-- I could give you ton of examples right now of coupon codes like this (check techbargains, newegg, HP's store, Dell Premier, etc). That just happened to be the best match I could find in a 30 minute span on that particular day.
Thats some kind of funny math where the advertised price is more relevant than the price you actually pay at the register, but no, the laptop cost $950 less (plus or minus for shipping) once you pay.
Here you go.
http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5064/5568018354_6d0b09d595_o.jpg
Aside from the excellent vendor support that powershell has (like NetApp / VMWare / Exchange / SQL / Amazon AWS etc etc), you would be out of your mind in a homogenous windows environment to scorn powershell-- especially considering it is the primary method of managing Server 2012+. What youre suggesting is like saying "screw GPOs, because theyre single vendor."
The "lockin" occurs because you have tens of thousands of workstations on one system and its very difficult to change, not because you wrote some scripts or took the time to learn a particular language. If you need to change things, learn a new language.