actually most people dont have a choice which provider they choose because there is usually only one ISP available.
When we say "most people" are we going by number of people, or by square miles? Rural areas, sure, crap choices. Even in the outskirts of suburbia, sure. Urban areas? Well darnit, to think that I only have only 3 choices of high speed ISP.
if espn wants to offer espn360 then they should do so through its website as an agreement between individuals, not through ISP's
The advantage of ISP level agreements is that they, potentially, allow for placing the data on or near the ISP's premises, thereby reducing costs for everyone. Though I do not know if this is the case for ESPN3, it is something I have seen references to in the past.
And all of this is moot since none of it is really about. Lack of broadband competition in some marketplaces is a separate problem. With a good competitive landscape some ISPs will subscribe to bundled services such as ESPN3 while others will choose to be lower cost providers and as such will not include such services. Create a competitive landscape and this problem (to whatever extent is is a problem) will solve itself.
Back in the day, you had to live with people who had different opinions from you. One of the unexpected side effects of "virtual communities" is that it's never been easier to surround yourself with people who think just like you do. It's never been easier to transition from eccentric to full blown kook.
"Back in the day" it was common to live in a socially isolated community with one, maybe two, hometown newspapers publishing only a small percentage of worldviews. It was common entire towns to go to the same church, listen to the same preacher, and all learn from the same teachers.
Today I get to chat with people from all around the world, from all across the political spectrum (heck, political spectrums, thanks to the internet many people have been exposed to the knowledge that there is more to political positions than just leftright!), and learn from people who have been taught all sorts of different philosophies and who possess an incredible variety of world views.
Sure I could go over in to some little enclosed militant left wing nut job forum, but close minded people are nothing new in the world. As someone who wants to learn as much as possible about the world around me, the internet gives me a much greater chance to do so.
it's now the most effective way to get out pro-corporatist agenda messages, so big business and corporatists politicians want to turn the Internet into TV.
Shut down Facebook, Wikipedia, and YouTube, and you don't have much of an internet left.
Large corporate sites have never been all that popular. Turns out most people would rather read about each others dinner on twitter than visit the GOP or DNC homepage. Imagine that!:P
Some ISPs pay Disney for the right to show ESPN3.com and ABC News Now content that other ISPs don't get.
That is not the main debate surrounding net neutrality. The primary concern of net neutrality is an ISP charging websites money in order for the website to be able to get through to the ISP's users, or an ISP not allowing video streaming protocols unless users "pay up" extra money.
What you are describing is premium content. Hell I am all in favor of that. If an ISP wants to gain a competitive advantage by working in conjunction with some media provider who has a desired resource, then that is just called good business all around. Users can, if they so wish, choose an ISP which has a partnering agreement with some desired media partner, and that media partner has a revenue stream which allows them to offer services which they may not otherwise be able to profitably offer.
Not everything can be supported by Adwords.:P I have no issue with people paying for premium content, I do have issue with ISPs holding content that is on the public internet hostage unless users or website operators pay up an additional fee.
MTV has threatened to make it's website pay-by-ISP in the past, but has been convinced that'd leave MTV.com with no audience.
Hey so the free market does work now and then.:)
The status quo is NOT "net neutrality" in any way.
The status quo is de facto net neutrality. Comcast pushes the boundaries now and again, but consumer backlash has so far been sufficient to halt further encroachments. Unfortunately smaller ISPs do not get the massive negative press that large ISPs such as Comcast receive, thus allowing the smaller ISPs to at times get away with BS that larger ISPs would get publicly chastised for.
So how exactly would passing a law that basically codifies current practices cause job loss?
I have yet to hear of any ISP charging Youtube extortion money. My files are still downloading at 2MB/s. Net neutrality legislation would just prevent future abuses by ISPs.
Outlawing all forms of traffic shaping technology, sure, I can see how that might cause a hit to ISP's profits, but the majority of proposed net neutrality legislation allows for some traffic shaping, it just prevents "pay up or else we'll make sure no one can access your website" levels of manipulation.
No, son. Our corporations care more about profits which is what drives these companies to move to places like China.
You know who else cares about profits? All the employees of that corporation, and the employee's family, and all the local stores and businesses those employees shop at every day, and the cities those employees live and pay taxes in and many many other people.
Companies offer products to customers. Those products add a certain amount of value to the customer's life (except when forced by law, no one knowingly buys a product that makes their life worse!).
If part of the value of a product is knowing that it was made by people working under fair labor conditions, then companies will offer products made under fair labor conditions. Indeed as you point out, a good number of companies do just that, both large and small.
This "ethical value add" has not yet propagated to all markets though, but if you read the article fully, it does exist to some extent even in the PC accessory market.
There already is a demand by consumers that the products they buy be made in factories that uphold some degree of human rights. That this factory is not doing such is why this is a news story. Corporations, such as Microsoft and HP, have human rights requirements for factories they contract work out to. This factory is going to great lengths to deceive the corporations that it does work for.
Now it would be awesome if at least a few of the large companies just outright cancelled their contract with this factory, especially since it isn't a busy PC sales season right now (at least not to the best of my knowledge) so any temporary disruptions in product availability would likely be offset by the good press the companies would get for taking such a direct pro-human rights action.
Your not "winning" unless your constantly growing, and then growing faster. The drive to show quarterly increases in profit have driven this "dive to the bottom" that is resulting in kids in China working 12-hour shifts to make your WalMart trash.
I do agree that the stock market's demands for endless quarterly growth is very problematic in many ways. On one hand it is completely unrealistic. But on the other hand, any company that is sitting on its laurals just doing same old same old, is likely to be torn to shreds as soon as a competitor comes along with a great new idea.
Heck look at Blockbuster versus Netflix. Blockbuster thought "quarterly growth" meant to keep opening more and more new stores and to up advertising to encourage customers to come in more often. To be fair they were constantly experimenting with new business models in regards to customer memberships, but unfortunatly for Blockbuster all of their business model ideas involved physical stores that people walked into. (For the record I prefer going to a store to pick out a DVD, browsing shelves is easier than browsing websites when you don't know what you want!)
Remember there are a number of ways companies can increase profits:
Increase their profit margin by cutting their costs somehow. This can only go so far before you end up in a race to the bottom. Initially though it is good because it encourages operational efficiency.
From stopping wasteful paper usage to putting an end to nepotism, when implemented properly, an efficient company is one that it is pleasurable to work with. No useless forms to fill out, only have to write your name down once, call up customer service and something gets done right away, stuff like that.
Increase their profit margin by increasing their potential customer base. Self explanatory. From making a more affordable version of an expensive product (good for society, gives everyone the option to buy the product if they want) to expanding to new markets, be in opening a new store across town, or translating software into a new language.
Meh, its almost all MSBuild underneath. I am not a fan of humans editing XML, but if it bothers you that much, go change it.:) Not that hard.
I had to do this for a few situations as well, where the IDE refused to let me tweak something that needed to be tweaked. One advantage of XML is that at least it is a known evil! (And MS Build is about as readable as I guess one could make an XML based build system that is as flexible as it is...)
Lets say they allow you to open up solutions file unchanged from VS2005. When ever you load a VS2005 solution, any new VS2008 feature that has some aspect of it saved in the solution file would have to be disabled. That also means additional code paths all over the place checking if you have a VS2005 solution loaded up or a VS2008 solution loaded up, and the displaying of appropriate error messages whenever the user tries to use such a disabled feature.
That is a messy solution, especially given that the most common imagined scenario is for a team of programers working together to all be using the same version of Visual Studio.
For a product like Word it may be worth it to extend the extra engineering effort to enable backwards compatibility for years on end (IIRC Office 2000 files can interoperate with Office XP and 2003 files A-OK, so two major releases), but for a product used by technical users, one expects that the technical users would rather have other aspects of the product polished more (gated checkins! Holy cripes, TFS finally has gated checkins!) and for developers to just run a one time wizard and convert their project over.
And actually it is possible to maintain a project across both VS2005 and VS2008. If you need a project to be used by both versions of VS, you only have to bother when changing project references or adding new source files, open the appropriate solution file up in both versions of VS and make the change to the project or the solution.
Yes it sucks. I've hit this same issue when VS2008 first came out and not everyone on my team was using it, yes it is a PITA. The solution was to tell everyone that they had to just get around to installing VS2008 before the next time they pulled down the latest copy of the code.
(And yah I see how it could suck if you have multiple teams and some team wants to stay with VS2005 for whatever reason)
But really, VS2008 supported so many new types of solutions, and in some cases, completely brand new ways to have certain types of solutions organized, that the file format was going to change. Just thinking about it for 10 seconds or so and it seems like maintaining back compat would have involved a UI nightmare, telling users seemingly random features are disabled always sucks, and should be avoided whenever possible.
The solution file format didn't change but they still added the "convert solution" nonsense that means you have to maintain two sln files to maintain backwards compatibility with 2005.. and means people who are using 2008 simply can't supply sln files to 2005 users.. and the vcproj files often need hacking. Why can't they maintain backwards compatibility... it's a text file!
The solution file is XML in both 2005 and 2008, true, but the capabilities of the file format have increased to support the new solution types of VS2008, amongst probably other reasons.
That is a stupid rule. What if I use Mechanical Turk to hire 1000 people to gather the same data? What if I have eidetic (photographic) memory, and can speed read, so I load up thousands upon thousands of facebook profile pages, glance at each one, then after I am finished write down what I have seen?
What if I load each page manually, but instead of having photographic memory I have a camera pointed at the screen and run the images it captures through OCR software?
At what point can we stop this and just declare facebook's rules stupid?
If they wanted to prevent crawlers due to bandwidth concerns they would use a robots.txt. Since they do not have a robots.txt file they are just being pricks.
Since MS employees are highly likely to get a discount on MS products it is extremely telling that it can't even sell its own dog food to its own employees.
The phone discount sucks. Costco has better sales.
That would be the folks who think that animal abusers should be tortured, castrated, deprived of their children, burned out of their homes,
And the problem with any of those is?
Hey I think I know how California could pay for this registry without any new taxes! Pay Per View events! $20 to see an animal torcherer get stoned to death.
This entire issue (light rail on 520) was already debated a few years ago. A vote was held, everyone said do light rail on i-90, the other bridge that crosses over Lake Washington. Time and money have already been invested in doing preliminary work on light rail for i-90. It is not like light rail is NOT going to happen across Lake Washington.
I actually support light rail on 520, the route is quite a bit saner (hits Downtown Seattle, University of Washington, Downtown Bellevue, MS Campus, and Downtown Redmond), compared to the I-90 route which hits, well, nothing really.
But again, it was already voted on. WE ALREADY WENT OVER HIS.
Meanwhile the 520 brige is falling apart.
Also delaying the 520 bridge to investigate light rail on it would also likely delay light rail on I-90, which sets the mass transit schedule for the entire region back. That in itself is not environmentally friendly!
What you think Microsoft just screwed up Windows Mobile on purpose for all those years?
Look at history, Windows Mobile came out swinging strong, kicking butt and taking names, and then it got bogged down in its own ecosytem as it attempted to support an ever wider and wider range and form factors of devices running on more and more different hardware platforms.
Mobile deviecs are far more complicated than desktops, both in terms of the little things (boot loaders!) to the big things (OEM relations!)
Microsoft learned this, I don't see how Google expected to basically copy Microsoft's mobile OS strategy (in every detail except for pricing) and have any less issues.
After all, there's no way that their malware tool could have spotted it
If a system has been rooted, nothing short of booting to another OS from a known clean media, mounting the disk read only, and scanning, is guaranteed to detect a root kit.
That'd make updates a real pain in the arse to install...
Word Processors are horrid for math classes.:) Hand written notes are much better IMHO. Describing diagrams also doesn't cut it when you are, for instance, trying to grasp exactly how nodes are added and removed from some tree structure, or the exact steps needed to balance some specific type of BST. Likewise for chemistry, physics, etc. While I agree for some classes typed notes work A-OK, even classes such as operating systems can benefit from hand drawn diagrams.
The spread of PowerPoint isn't helping anything though, I would much rather that a professor walk through steps to accomplish some task on the board, letting the class go through the actions of drawing each step out themselves, than just point at some slides that have the steps already drawn in.
Also a real note taking program, an app designed just around taking notes, allows for very flexible organization of notes. E.g. dated tabs running down the side of the screen, or have notes organized by topic, or a mix of whatever organizational styles you want.
I got a hold of a Tablet PC during my Junior year of my CS degree, just in time for my advanced Algorithms class.
Fun. Lots and lots of fun. Thanks to OneNote I didn't have to touch paper for an entire year. I did everything in OneNote, including homework, which was exported and emailed into my profs.
OneNote syncs up notes with audio recordings taken during lectures/meetings/etc, and my Tablet had a 3d Mic Array, which means it had (IIRC) 3 microphones spread out around it and I could tell the software which direction to emphasis recording from.
The model was a Toshiba M200, 12" screen long before the current trend of smaller laptops was in style. Everyone was lugging around their 15" monster laptop that had an hour or so battery life, at the start of each lecture they would rush to the power outlets so that they could feed their machine. My 3hr battery life lasted me through an entire day of lectures.
Studies have shown [citation needed] that the physical act of writing notes helps with both comprehension and recall. I have always hated taking notes out, my fine motor skills are horrible and I writing hurts my writes like hell, but the benefits were so obvious that I continued to do so anyway.
The only problem with laptops in classrooms is that I tended to post a lot on/. during boring lectures...
Slashdot Mirror
When we say "most people" are we going by number of people, or by square miles? Rural areas, sure, crap choices. Even in the outskirts of suburbia, sure. Urban areas? Well darnit, to think that I only have only 3 choices of high speed ISP.
The advantage of ISP level agreements is that they, potentially, allow for placing the data on or near the ISP's premises, thereby reducing costs for everyone. Though I do not know if this is the case for ESPN3, it is something I have seen references to in the past.
And all of this is moot since none of it is really about. Lack of broadband competition in some marketplaces is a separate problem. With a good competitive landscape some ISPs will subscribe to bundled services such as ESPN3 while others will choose to be lower cost providers and as such will not include such services. Create a competitive landscape and this problem (to whatever extent is is a problem) will solve itself.
"Back in the day" it was common to live in a socially isolated community with one, maybe two, hometown newspapers publishing only a small percentage of worldviews. It was common entire towns to go to the same church, listen to the same preacher, and all learn from the same teachers.
Today I get to chat with people from all around the world, from all across the political spectrum (heck, political spectrums, thanks to the internet many people have been exposed to the knowledge that there is more to political positions than just leftright!), and learn from people who have been taught all sorts of different philosophies and who possess an incredible variety of world views.
Sure I could go over in to some little enclosed militant left wing nut job forum, but close minded people are nothing new in the world. As someone who wants to learn as much as possible about the world around me, the internet gives me a much greater chance to do so.
Shut down Facebook, Wikipedia, and YouTube, and you don't have much of an internet left.
Large corporate sites have never been all that popular. Turns out most people would rather read about each others dinner on twitter than visit the GOP or DNC homepage. Imagine that! :P
That is not the main debate surrounding net neutrality. The primary concern of net neutrality is an ISP charging websites money in order for the website to be able to get through to the ISP's users, or an ISP not allowing video streaming protocols unless users "pay up" extra money.
What you are describing is premium content. Hell I am all in favor of that. If an ISP wants to gain a competitive advantage by working in conjunction with some media provider who has a desired resource, then that is just called good business all around. Users can, if they so wish, choose an ISP which has a partnering agreement with some desired media partner, and that media partner has a revenue stream which allows them to offer services which they may not otherwise be able to profitably offer.
Not everything can be supported by Adwords. :P I have no issue with people paying for premium content, I do have issue with ISPs holding content that is on the public internet hostage unless users or website operators pay up an additional fee.
Hey so the free market does work now and then. :)
The status quo is de facto net neutrality. Comcast pushes the boundaries now and again, but consumer backlash has so far been sufficient to halt further encroachments. Unfortunately smaller ISPs do not get the massive negative press that large ISPs such as Comcast receive, thus allowing the smaller ISPs to at times get away with BS that larger ISPs would get publicly chastised for.
That is like saying
"By not legalizing roving death squads, you are costing us jobs!"
Because hey, roving death squads obviously have employees!
In other news, second born children in families with large inheritances found to be largely in favor of net neutrality legislation.
So how exactly would passing a law that basically codifies current practices cause job loss?
I have yet to hear of any ISP charging Youtube extortion money. My files are still downloading at 2MB/s. Net neutrality legislation would just prevent future abuses by ISPs.
Outlawing all forms of traffic shaping technology, sure, I can see how that might cause a hit to ISP's profits, but the majority of proposed net neutrality legislation allows for some traffic shaping, it just prevents "pay up or else we'll make sure no one can access your website" levels of manipulation.
You know who else cares about profits? All the employees of that corporation, and the employee's family, and all the local stores and businesses those employees shop at every day, and the cities those employees live and pay taxes in and many many other people.
Companies offer products to customers. Those products add a certain amount of value to the customer's life (except when forced by law, no one knowingly buys a product that makes their life worse!).
If part of the value of a product is knowing that it was made by people working under fair labor conditions, then companies will offer products made under fair labor conditions. Indeed as you point out, a good number of companies do just that, both large and small.
This "ethical value add" has not yet propagated to all markets though, but if you read the article fully, it does exist to some extent even in the PC accessory market.
There already is a demand by consumers that the products they buy be made in factories that uphold some degree of human rights. That this factory is not doing such is why this is a news story. Corporations, such as Microsoft and HP, have human rights requirements for factories they contract work out to. This factory is going to great lengths to deceive the corporations that it does work for.
Now it would be awesome if at least a few of the large companies just outright cancelled their contract with this factory, especially since it isn't a busy PC sales season right now (at least not to the best of my knowledge) so any temporary disruptions in product availability would likely be offset by the good press the companies would get for taking such a direct pro-human rights action.
I do agree that the stock market's demands for endless quarterly growth is very problematic in many ways. On one hand it is completely unrealistic. But on the other hand, any company that is sitting on its laurals just doing same old same old, is likely to be torn to shreds as soon as a competitor comes along with a great new idea.
Heck look at Blockbuster versus Netflix. Blockbuster thought "quarterly growth" meant to keep opening more and more new stores and to up advertising to encourage customers to come in more often. To be fair they were constantly experimenting with new business models in regards to customer memberships, but unfortunatly for Blockbuster all of their business model ideas involved physical stores that people walked into. (For the record I prefer going to a store to pick out a DVD, browsing shelves is easier than browsing websites when you don't know what you want!)
Remember there are a number of ways companies can increase profits:
As long as you keep them all straight, nothing bad should happen.... /me ducks head between legs.
Meh, its almost all MSBuild underneath. I am not a fan of humans editing XML, but if it bothers you that much, go change it. :) Not that hard.
I had to do this for a few situations as well, where the IDE refused to let me tweak something that needed to be tweaked. One advantage of XML is that at least it is a known evil! (And MS Build is about as readable as I guess one could make an XML based build system that is as flexible as it is...)
What do you mean by backwards compatibility?
Lets say they allow you to open up solutions file unchanged from VS2005. When ever you load a VS2005 solution, any new VS2008 feature that has some aspect of it saved in the solution file would have to be disabled. That also means additional code paths all over the place checking if you have a VS2005 solution loaded up or a VS2008 solution loaded up, and the displaying of appropriate error messages whenever the user tries to use such a disabled feature.
That is a messy solution, especially given that the most common imagined scenario is for a team of programers working together to all be using the same version of Visual Studio.
For a product like Word it may be worth it to extend the extra engineering effort to enable backwards compatibility for years on end (IIRC Office 2000 files can interoperate with Office XP and 2003 files A-OK, so two major releases), but for a product used by technical users, one expects that the technical users would rather have other aspects of the product polished more (gated checkins! Holy cripes, TFS finally has gated checkins!) and for developers to just run a one time wizard and convert their project over.
And actually it is possible to maintain a project across both VS2005 and VS2008. If you need a project to be used by both versions of VS, you only have to bother when changing project references or adding new source files, open the appropriate solution file up in both versions of VS and make the change to the project or the solution.
Yes it sucks. I've hit this same issue when VS2008 first came out and not everyone on my team was using it, yes it is a PITA. The solution was to tell everyone that they had to just get around to installing VS2008 before the next time they pulled down the latest copy of the code.
(And yah I see how it could suck if you have multiple teams and some team wants to stay with VS2005 for whatever reason)
But really, VS2008 supported so many new types of solutions, and in some cases, completely brand new ways to have certain types of solutions organized, that the file format was going to change. Just thinking about it for 10 seconds or so and it seems like maintaining back compat would have involved a UI nightmare, telling users seemingly random features are disabled always sucks, and should be avoided whenever possible.
The solution file is XML in both 2005 and 2008, true, but the capabilities of the file format have increased to support the new solution types of VS2008, amongst probably other reasons.
That is a stupid rule. What if I use Mechanical Turk to hire 1000 people to gather the same data? What if I have eidetic (photographic) memory, and can speed read, so I load up thousands upon thousands of facebook profile pages, glance at each one, then after I am finished write down what I have seen?
What if I load each page manually, but instead of having photographic memory I have a camera pointed at the screen and run the images it captures through OCR software?
At what point can we stop this and just declare facebook's rules stupid?
If they wanted to prevent crawlers due to bandwidth concerns they would use a robots.txt. Since they do not have a robots.txt file they are just being pricks.
I have signed all of 2 pieces of work related paper since starting work ~3 years ago.
Wait, make that 3. I had to sketch out how I wanted my desk + bookcase arranged when moving buildings.
I most often use the work printer for printing out maps of places I am going after work.
The phone discount sucks. Costco has better sales.
And the problem with any of those is?
Hey I think I know how California could pay for this registry without any new taxes! Pay Per View events! $20 to see an animal torcherer get stoned to death.
What else explains why all little Chinese girls are born knowing how to play classical Piano?
(I kid, I kid)
Seriously though, this does seem rather obvious. People who cannot keep up with societies expectations do not have as much luck breeding. Duh.
This entire issue (light rail on 520) was already debated a few years ago. A vote was held, everyone said do light rail on i-90, the other bridge that crosses over Lake Washington. Time and money have already been invested in doing preliminary work on light rail for i-90. It is not like light rail is NOT going to happen across Lake Washington.
I actually support light rail on 520, the route is quite a bit saner (hits Downtown Seattle, University of Washington, Downtown Bellevue, MS Campus, and Downtown Redmond), compared to the I-90 route which hits, well, nothing really.
But again, it was already voted on. WE ALREADY WENT OVER HIS.
Meanwhile the 520 brige is falling apart.
Also delaying the 520 bridge to investigate light rail on it would also likely delay light rail on I-90, which sets the mass transit schedule for the entire region back. That in itself is not environmentally friendly!
Don't be so sure of that.
What you think Microsoft just screwed up Windows Mobile on purpose for all those years?
Look at history, Windows Mobile came out swinging strong, kicking butt and taking names, and then it got bogged down in its own ecosytem as it attempted to support an ever wider and wider range and form factors of devices running on more and more different hardware platforms.
Mobile deviecs are far more complicated than desktops, both in terms of the little things (boot loaders!) to the big things (OEM relations!)
Microsoft learned this, I don't see how Google expected to basically copy Microsoft's mobile OS strategy (in every detail except for pricing) and have any less issues.
Who the hell still uses .lit?
Wonderful reader software though, works great, if you can find any content for it. Also works great on what few, old, smart phones it runs on.
Comcast's HD cable boxes in my area do not even support HDMI out.
What back water region do I live in?
Seattle WA. :(
If a system has been rooted, nothing short of booting to another OS from a known clean media, mounting the disk read only, and scanning, is guaranteed to detect a root kit.
That'd make updates a real pain in the arse to install...
Word Processors are horrid for math classes. :) Hand written notes are much better IMHO. Describing diagrams also doesn't cut it when you are, for instance, trying to grasp exactly how nodes are added and removed from some tree structure, or the exact steps needed to balance some specific type of BST. Likewise for chemistry, physics, etc. While I agree for some classes typed notes work A-OK, even classes such as operating systems can benefit from hand drawn diagrams.
The spread of PowerPoint isn't helping anything though, I would much rather that a professor walk through steps to accomplish some task on the board, letting the class go through the actions of drawing each step out themselves, than just point at some slides that have the steps already drawn in.
Also a real note taking program, an app designed just around taking notes, allows for very flexible organization of notes. E.g. dated tabs running down the side of the screen, or have notes organized by topic, or a mix of whatever organizational styles you want.
I got a hold of a Tablet PC during my Junior year of my CS degree, just in time for my advanced Algorithms class.
Fun. Lots and lots of fun. Thanks to OneNote I didn't have to touch paper for an entire year. I did everything in OneNote, including homework, which was exported and emailed into my profs.
OneNote syncs up notes with audio recordings taken during lectures/meetings/etc, and my Tablet had a 3d Mic Array, which means it had (IIRC) 3 microphones spread out around it and I could tell the software which direction to emphasis recording from.
The model was a Toshiba M200, 12" screen long before the current trend of smaller laptops was in style. Everyone was lugging around their 15" monster laptop that had an hour or so battery life, at the start of each lecture they would rush to the power outlets so that they could feed their machine. My 3hr battery life lasted me through an entire day of lectures.
Studies have shown [citation needed] that the physical act of writing notes helps with both comprehension and recall. I have always hated taking notes out, my fine motor skills are horrible and I writing hurts my writes like hell, but the benefits were so obvious that I continued to do so anyway.
The only problem with laptops in classrooms is that I tended to post a lot on /. during boring lectures...