One of the many strengths of the United States Constitution is that it provides for a resolution to this kind of problem that is well short of overthrowing the government, specifically, appealling court decisions which involve the Patriot Act until a court is reached which has the scope to rule on that compatibility.
Damn you Anton Scalia!
Seriously though, the constitution really hasn't given us an effective method of removing supreme court justices who make decisions restricting the constitutionally-given civil rights of individuals, or a congress that repeatedly has shown a will to pass laws, seemingly ignorant of their blatant unconstitutionality.
You could make a strong case that this isn't the problem; rather, the problem is that we don't have an effective protocol for systematically disenfranchising voters who willfully vote for politicians who would abridge the constitutional rights of US citizens. We don't know how to shrink the country if we decide that it's too big to govern with a single federation.
I agree completely. Would your nation, whatever that may be, take its armed forces, and start bombing/invading ours? Any collateral damage done to our civilians would be perfectly understandable, seeing as we have failed to meet our responsibility to overthrow our government after they stole our inalienable rights.
...and while you're at it, could you see if you could aim most of that collateral damage in the direction of, say, West Virginia and Oklahoma?
Right, whether or not you'll be satisfied with the performance of an eMac or Mac mini depends entirely on your demands and expectations. (And how long you plan on keeping the machine before replacing it/upgrading it!) There are few things that could cause these computers to be total failures for you: if your idea of a development workstation is a dual head system, if you're developing 3D games and need fancier video acceleration, or if you need a 64-bit CPU for some reason. But for the most part, it's just a matter of how big your project is and how long you mind waiting for compiles. If you're a CS undergrad student working on programming assignments, no problem.
For the past 3.5 years my primary C/C++ development environment has been a 933 MHz Pentium 3. Obviously I would not recommend anyone buy such a thing today, but the only reason it's somewhat inadequate for the work I do on it is that some of my projects are so huge that it can take quite a while just to scan all the source and object files to see if any of the binaries need to be compiled or linked prior to a debug session - even if none of them do. For Java dev, the machine actually is totally inadequate. But that's mainly because I use Eclipse, not the project's fault.
The point is, if you haven't used an even somewhat comparable Mac before for development work, you'll have to try one and find out what will meet your needs.
Anybody out there used an eMac for development work? Upgraded to 512mb, are they usable for general C/C++ development or is the Powermac the only way to go for anything beyond email and word processing?
No. Prior to the advent of 1.25 GHz chips, no one did C/C++ development. Duh.
A good UI would allow either to be typed into the address bar, check if they are a valid URL, and if not treat them as a search term. This isn't exactly hard to do, but seems not to have been done by any browser I've yet used.
Internet Explorer does this (check "Search from the Address bar"), but it does it terribly and I always end up turning it off as soon as I notice that it's on. Usually it ends up searching for my mis-typed URLs, which it will find no hits for. Of course, first it has to try to load the "address", wait for the NS lookup to fail, contact its search engine, and then render the results complete w/ advertising and chartjunk. Obviously it has to use some shitty search engine, too (i.e., not google).
iCab, as I recall, has a much better implementation. You can do "g <search terms>" in the address bar to search google, etc. This works well because presumably even if you can't remember to use the right UI control when you want to search, you definitely know whether or not you want to go to a specific URL or search for something.
Many companies allow you to receive cash instead of company stock. That is called a Stock Appreciation Right (SAR). Usually this information is contained in the annual report.
Well, this is different from the previous statement, which implied anyone (at least theoretically) had this choice. A quick googling for my employer and "Stock Appreciation Right" doesn't turn up anything interesting, so I'm guessing it doesn't apply to me. But simply googling for SAR finds a page which implies to me that SARs and stock options are totally different animals.
This change will make stock options for anyone except the top most layers of management a thing of the past.
Quite the contrary. Some companies will give up issuing stock options all together (Microsoft has already basically done this, good for them). Others will decide that it is not practical to issue thousands upon thousands of heavily discounted options to executives. The formula to calculate how much to expense an option specifies that the more an option is discounted, the more it is worth, obviously multipled by the number of options issued. Regular employees will still get the same small quantities of market priced options, which are much cheaper to issue (as defined by the new rules).
You see, stock options are already expensed. The main measure of the value of a company is the Earnings Per Share, or EPS.
Uh huh. There are a million ways to valuate a company, and if EPS were the One True Way, we never would have seen the dotcom bubble of the 90s, nor countless other over- (and under!) valued companies. Regardless, the value of the shares of the company are not the same as the value as the assets of the company, nor should it. Expensing of stock options is a charge against the assets, just like payroll, which is necessary because previously there was no accounting required for the cost of stock options in the company's assets.
The idea behind stock options was to give the people in the company- not just the upper level management, but everyone- a stake in the company.
There are much better ways to accomplish this than issuing stock options. Give me actual stock, not stock options. Or better yet, give me cash, and encourage me to buy my own stock. Offer employees a stock purchase program. Ownership in my company is what gives me a stake in the company and an incentive or interest in its success. Options are much more reserved than actual stock. There's no actual stake in the company until you choose to exercise it (buy it).
The problem is with the CEOs getting multimillion dollar stock grants, on pennies on the dollar, effective immediately. This encourages to pump up next quarter's numbers by any means, hook or crook, so they can dump their stock. And to heck with where the company will be a year, let alone five years from now.
This is a problem with both share grants and option grants. The real solution is restricted stock grants, which don't permit executives to sell for a number of years or until they leave the company. Unfortunately fewer companies do this because executives demand big and immediate bonuses.
YOU DO NOT HAVE TO ACCEPT OPTIONS IN LIEU OF CASH. This is a decision each employee makes. You can, in theory, accept a lower pay of pure cash instead of a "higher" pay composed of stock options.
I am intruiged by your theory and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter. Seriously, how do you propose that I get my employer to give me cash instead of stock options?
If the stock options you get are worth nothing, is that really an expense?
Certainly. If a company give its employees worthless (underwater) stock options, they will likely find themselves in a bad position later on, when their employees realize they've been had. The company could be forced to buy back the stock options, reissue them at a lower strike price, exchange them for stock grants, or the lack of employees' confidence in the stock could simply force them to give out cheaper options or actual cash instead in the future. All of these represent a loss of value to the company. It shouldn't come as a surprise to investors because the company has been claiming the options it was giving out were "free" all along: the company should claim the expense up front when they issue the options.
The worst aspect of the H1B program is that it is not an imigration program but nearly a form of indentured servitude. The visa holder is often at the mercy of the sponsor, not free to switch jobs easily, and facing deportation once his visa expires. This may be used by corporations to hold down wages and dissent.
That's funny - I'm a US citizen working in the US in the software industry, and my wages and dissent are held down by the threat of immigrants (H1B or other) and outsourcing. Of course, when software engineers become completely unemployable in the US, I won't be deported to India (where I could likely find work, if they'd let me), I'll just be unemployed.
If you grew up in the US, then that means that for the first 18-22 years of your life (at least) you weren't helping to pay for the infrastructure you took advantage of, either
Where are you getting this? I grew up in the US, and I have been paying for the infrastructure I take advantage of at least since the age of 14.
doesn't like this much, Symantec is down 8% and Veritas is down slightly as well, and so far has failed to approach the takeover price of around $30 bucks a share. Probably due to increased competition in the secuiruty market.
Symantec doesn't have $30/share for Veritas. It's actually a stock for stock trade, with 1 share of Veritas getting 1.1242 shares of Symantec. At $25.15 for Symantec, that only makes Veritas worth $28.27/share.
Re:Cool! Just like form AutoComplete
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· Score: 2, Informative
Not always. Big-Oh only means the worst case. Quicksort is O(n^2), but the worst case is so rare that it usually performs better than many O(n log n) algorithms.
Furthermore, Big-Oh only means an upper limit on the worst case. Quicksort is O(n^4), and O(n^5), and O(n^6). It also happens to be O(n^2), which is a much more useful statement. For some reason people like to talk about Big-Oh even if they really mean Big-Theta.
The internet existed before Slashdot. I'm sure geeks can adapt to an internet where all content is either subscription-based or provided by independently wealthy volunteers.
No longer would pollution, poor city planning, etc be a problem for their grandchildren/successors. Each and every person would have to spend at least 900 years living with the consequences of their decisions.
I think you've got it partially backwards. People will still be idiots. Becoming a crack addict in your teens will fuck up your twenties, but that doesn't stop people from becoming crack addicts in their teens. (...) No, when everyone can live to be 1000, young people will just seem extra stupid compared to older people (damn 90-year-old whipper-snapper!). People may spend the first 100 years of their lives making bad decisions which they then regret for the latter 900 years of their lives. This isn't to say you're all wrong, though. For example, I think the quality of the fresh air I breathe is pretty good. But if I could remember what it was like to breathe fresh air 300 years ago, I might not be so quick to put hydrocarbon byproducts in the air all the time. But the social divide between first-centurians and multi-centurians will be great.
*excellent!* The free market drove innovation; bringing cheap, quality parts to consumers. Where was the problem again, exactly? Just imagine if you had left your second product as open as the first. Incremental improvements available far and wide for a good price. I can't wait for free open design hardware to become available.
Cheap OR quality, not both. Without any protection for IP, your choices are cheap knock-off with no R&D overhead, or overpriced original with additional R&D overhead to cover the costs of obfuscation the design so as to avoid getting copied.
Re:Oh Debian, I don't know what to think
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If you want modern packages, you often have to hang out with the "unstable" crowd, rather than the "testing" crowd. But this is like being signed up for regular crotch-kicks, since unstable breaks systems on a practically weekly basis.
This is, I think, an understandable misconception. It's not obvoius, but it's simple to set up Debian to use testing for your system, and unstable for any packages you don't feel are "modern" enough. All you need is both testing and unstable in your sources list, and then "APT::Default-Release testing;" in apt.conf.d. I run my box this way and I have 9 unstable packages installed, 3 stable, and 1008 testing.
This, plus dependency creep, makes anything but "stable" debian sort of a drag.
This I will agree with. gnome-desktop-environment terrifies me. It requires me to have an ungodly amount of packages installed that I will probably never use, but I don't dare remove the whole thing.
Yes, unfortunately, RPI has improved its name recognition by finding bullshit benchmarks like this one and satisfying their irrelevant criteria, rather than actually making the school better. Quality students and faculty may be attracted to the shiny statistics, but they won't stay without high quality campus life, professors, programs, and curriculum.
Also, nobody requires students to run windows, in fact there is a large effort by the ACM and other groups to install linux.
Hooray for the ACM. I have a hundred times more respect for them than I do for the actual administration. Unfortunately they don't run the school. What bothers me is their willingness to extend the hegemony of Windows into the academic sphere. When they first started the laptop program, they said you can use a powerbook if you run Virtual PC on it. The current requirements don't even seem to allow that, AFAICT.
Dorms may be firewalled off, but it isn't restrictive like you claim, it just blocks incoming ssh, ftp and a few others.
When they implemented the firewall, it blocked all incoming connections. They later relaxed it so port 80 was unblocked for HTTP - all other ports and applications were still blocked. Has this changed?
And the problems with the RIAA came because RPI students wrote some amazing software for searching networks, further demonstrating the power of the RPI network.
Phynd is great and all, but I wouldn't exactly call it amazing. All it demonstrates is that the network works at all. I am not impressed on RPI's part. Do they defend their students, or just collaborate with the RIAA? That is the important test.
The only reason RPI is so high on the list is because the administration is a bunch of pandering suck-ups who will do whatever it takes to meet a trendy benchmark rather than actually earn respect the old fashioned way. RPI wants to be at the top of this list, so they excel at filling this requirements that Forbes is looking for. Yahoo does such a ranking, and for years RPI has been near the top of that list.
In reality, RPI's dorm network is a mess, they manditorily firewall off all students, and computer labs have disappeared because since 1999 they've required all students to have a laptop (and essentially required them to run windows). They've had among the worst problems with file sharing and the RIAA. Sure, there "is a" wireless network. Great. Ooh, and email access off campus! Too bad Rensselaer alumni free email for life is, as of this month, no longer.
Usenet is, as far as I can tell, completely worthless.
Email pisses me off. Its value is a fraction of what it was 5 or even 3 years ago. The only reason it remains at all usable is that people like it so much and they've put a lot of effort into making it usable.
IRC is a fraction of its former self. EFNet in particular has fallen.
Slashdot has been forced to implement user accounts and moderation.
Napster is dead. I'm not talking new legit-and-by-the-books Napster, I'm talking about oldschool Napster. So we invented gnutella. It sucks.
Older protocols have died and been superceded by replacements which have been more fortunate: talk, gopher, archie.
Future Internet Deaths
3+ years ago, google was strong. It is increasingly common to search for certain things on google and come back with 2+ pages of google-bombed advertising instead of real information.
Slashdot will destroy itself by reaching a critical mass where no one will be able to read articles posted to slashdot before the slashdot effect downs the hosting servers. Since no one will have read the articles, all of the posters won't have read the articles.
But the original parent was comparing a Dell to a $1299 iMac G5, and finding that it costs $7 less than the Dell.
Now you're telling me I should consider the $1499 - as of today - PowerMac G5? I can only assume that Dell does not charge me $193 to drop the monitor from their configuration.
Slashdot Mirror
One of the many strengths of the United States Constitution is that it provides for a resolution to this kind of problem that is well short of overthrowing the government, specifically, appealling court decisions which involve the Patriot Act until a court is reached which has the scope to rule on that compatibility.
Damn you Anton Scalia!
Seriously though, the constitution really hasn't given us an effective method of removing supreme court justices who make decisions restricting the constitutionally-given civil rights of individuals, or a congress that repeatedly has shown a will to pass laws, seemingly ignorant of their blatant unconstitutionality.
You could make a strong case that this isn't the problem; rather, the problem is that we don't have an effective protocol for systematically disenfranchising voters who willfully vote for politicians who would abridge the constitutional rights of US citizens. We don't know how to shrink the country if we decide that it's too big to govern with a single federation.
I agree completely. Would your nation, whatever that may be, take its armed forces, and start bombing/invading ours? Any collateral damage done to our civilians would be perfectly understandable, seeing as we have failed to meet our responsibility to overthrow our government after they stole our inalienable rights.
...and while you're at it, could you see if you could aim most of that collateral damage in the direction of, say, West Virginia and Oklahoma?
Right, whether or not you'll be satisfied with the performance of an eMac or Mac mini depends entirely on your demands and expectations. (And how long you plan on keeping the machine before replacing it/upgrading it!) There are few things that could cause these computers to be total failures for you: if your idea of a development workstation is a dual head system, if you're developing 3D games and need fancier video acceleration, or if you need a 64-bit CPU for some reason. But for the most part, it's just a matter of how big your project is and how long you mind waiting for compiles. If you're a CS undergrad student working on programming assignments, no problem.
For the past 3.5 years my primary C/C++ development environment has been a 933 MHz Pentium 3. Obviously I would not recommend anyone buy such a thing today, but the only reason it's somewhat inadequate for the work I do on it is that some of my projects are so huge that it can take quite a while just to scan all the source and object files to see if any of the binaries need to be compiled or linked prior to a debug session - even if none of them do. For Java dev, the machine actually is totally inadequate. But that's mainly because I use Eclipse, not the project's fault.
The point is, if you haven't used an even somewhat comparable Mac before for development work, you'll have to try one and find out what will meet your needs.
Anybody out there used an eMac for development work? Upgraded to 512mb, are they usable for general C/C++ development or is the Powermac the only way to go for anything beyond email and word processing?
No. Prior to the advent of 1.25 GHz chips, no one did C/C++ development. Duh.
A good UI would allow either to be typed into the address bar, check if they are a valid URL, and if not treat them as a search term. This isn't exactly hard to do, but seems not to have been done by any browser I've yet used.
Internet Explorer does this (check "Search from the Address bar"), but it does it terribly and I always end up turning it off as soon as I notice that it's on. Usually it ends up searching for my mis-typed URLs, which it will find no hits for. Of course, first it has to try to load the "address", wait for the NS lookup to fail, contact its search engine, and then render the results complete w/ advertising and chartjunk. Obviously it has to use some shitty search engine, too (i.e., not google).
iCab, as I recall, has a much better implementation. You can do "g <search terms>" in the address bar to search google, etc. This works well because presumably even if you can't remember to use the right UI control when you want to search, you definitely know whether or not you want to go to a specific URL or search for something.
Many companies allow you to receive cash instead of company stock. That is called a Stock Appreciation Right (SAR). Usually this information is contained in the annual report.
Well, this is different from the previous statement, which implied anyone (at least theoretically) had this choice. A quick googling for my employer and "Stock Appreciation Right" doesn't turn up anything interesting, so I'm guessing it doesn't apply to me. But simply googling for SAR finds a page which implies to me that SARs and stock options are totally different animals.
This change will make stock options for anyone except the top most layers of management a thing of the past.
Quite the contrary. Some companies will give up issuing stock options all together (Microsoft has already basically done this, good for them). Others will decide that it is not practical to issue thousands upon thousands of heavily discounted options to executives. The formula to calculate how much to expense an option specifies that the more an option is discounted, the more it is worth, obviously multipled by the number of options issued. Regular employees will still get the same small quantities of market priced options, which are much cheaper to issue (as defined by the new rules).
You see, stock options are already expensed. The main measure of the value of a company is the Earnings Per Share, or EPS.
Uh huh. There are a million ways to valuate a company, and if EPS were the One True Way, we never would have seen the dotcom bubble of the 90s, nor countless other over- (and under!) valued companies. Regardless, the value of the shares of the company are not the same as the value as the assets of the company, nor should it. Expensing of stock options is a charge against the assets, just like payroll, which is necessary because previously there was no accounting required for the cost of stock options in the company's assets.
The idea behind stock options was to give the people in the company- not just the upper level management, but everyone- a stake in the company.
There are much better ways to accomplish this than issuing stock options. Give me actual stock, not stock options. Or better yet, give me cash, and encourage me to buy my own stock. Offer employees a stock purchase program. Ownership in my company is what gives me a stake in the company and an incentive or interest in its success. Options are much more reserved than actual stock. There's no actual stake in the company until you choose to exercise it (buy it).
The problem is with the CEOs getting multimillion dollar stock grants, on pennies on the dollar, effective immediately. This encourages to pump up next quarter's numbers by any means, hook or crook, so they can dump their stock. And to heck with where the company will be a year, let alone five years from now.
This is a problem with both share grants and option grants. The real solution is restricted stock grants, which don't permit executives to sell for a number of years or until they leave the company. Unfortunately fewer companies do this because executives demand big and immediate bonuses.
YOU DO NOT HAVE TO ACCEPT OPTIONS IN LIEU OF CASH. This is a decision each employee makes. You can, in theory, accept a lower pay of pure cash instead of a "higher" pay composed of stock options.
I am intruiged by your theory and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter. Seriously, how do you propose that I get my employer to give me cash instead of stock options?
If the stock options you get are worth nothing, is that really an expense?
Certainly. If a company give its employees worthless (underwater) stock options, they will likely find themselves in a bad position later on, when their employees realize they've been had. The company could be forced to buy back the stock options, reissue them at a lower strike price, exchange them for stock grants, or the lack of employees' confidence in the stock could simply force them to give out cheaper options or actual cash instead in the future. All of these represent a loss of value to the company. It shouldn't come as a surprise to investors because the company has been claiming the options it was giving out were "free" all along: the company should claim the expense up front when they issue the options.
The worst aspect of the H1B program is that it is not an imigration program but nearly a form of indentured servitude. The visa holder is often at the mercy of the sponsor, not free to switch jobs easily, and facing deportation once his visa expires. This may be used by corporations to hold down wages and dissent.
That's funny - I'm a US citizen working in the US in the software industry, and my wages and dissent are held down by the threat of immigrants (H1B or other) and outsourcing. Of course, when software engineers become completely unemployable in the US, I won't be deported to India (where I could likely find work, if they'd let me), I'll just be unemployed.
If you grew up in the US, then that means that for the first 18-22 years of your life (at least) you weren't helping to pay for the infrastructure you took advantage of, either
Where are you getting this? I grew up in the US, and I have been paying for the infrastructure I take advantage of at least since the age of 14.
doesn't like this much, Symantec is down 8% and Veritas is down slightly as well, and so far has failed to approach the takeover price of around $30 bucks a share. Probably due to increased competition in the secuiruty market.
Symantec doesn't have $30/share for Veritas. It's actually a stock for stock trade, with 1 share of Veritas getting 1.1242 shares of Symantec. At $25.15 for Symantec, that only makes Veritas worth $28.27/share.
If the story that Oracle had planned to buy PeopleSoft in order to discontinue their products really is a myth, journalists and analysts can't take all the blame. Craig Conway of PeopleSoft also did his part to encourage people to believe that was Ellison's goal.
Not always. Big-Oh only means the worst case. Quicksort is O(n^2), but the worst case is so rare that it usually performs better than many O(n log n) algorithms.
Furthermore, Big-Oh only means an upper limit on the worst case. Quicksort is O(n^4), and O(n^5), and O(n^6). It also happens to be O(n^2), which is a much more useful statement. For some reason people like to talk about Big-Oh even if they really mean Big-Theta.
The internet existed before Slashdot. I'm sure geeks can adapt to an internet where all content is either subscription-based or provided by independently wealthy volunteers.
No longer would pollution, poor city planning, etc be a problem for their grandchildren/successors. Each and every person would have to spend at least 900 years living with the consequences of their decisions.
I think you've got it partially backwards. People will still be idiots. Becoming a crack addict in your teens will fuck up your twenties, but that doesn't stop people from becoming crack addicts in their teens. (...) No, when everyone can live to be 1000, young people will just seem extra stupid compared to older people (damn 90-year-old whipper-snapper!). People may spend the first 100 years of their lives making bad decisions which they then regret for the latter 900 years of their lives. This isn't to say you're all wrong, though. For example, I think the quality of the fresh air I breathe is pretty good. But if I could remember what it was like to breathe fresh air 300 years ago, I might not be so quick to put hydrocarbon byproducts in the air all the time. But the social divide between first-centurians and multi-centurians will be great.
No, apparently they weren't.
*excellent!* The free market drove innovation; bringing cheap, quality parts to consumers. Where was the problem again, exactly? Just imagine if you had left your second product as open as the first. Incremental improvements available far and wide for a good price. I can't wait for free open design hardware to become available.
Cheap OR quality, not both. Without any protection for IP, your choices are cheap knock-off with no R&D overhead, or overpriced original with additional R&D overhead to cover the costs of obfuscation the design so as to avoid getting copied.
If you want modern packages, you often have to hang out with the "unstable" crowd, rather than the "testing" crowd. But this is like being signed up for regular crotch-kicks, since unstable breaks systems on a practically weekly basis.
This is, I think, an understandable misconception. It's not obvoius, but it's simple to set up Debian to use testing for your system, and unstable for any packages you don't feel are "modern" enough. All you need is both testing and unstable in your sources list, and then "APT::Default-Release testing;" in apt.conf.d. I run my box this way and I have 9 unstable packages installed, 3 stable, and 1008 testing.
This, plus dependency creep, makes anything but "stable" debian sort of a drag.
This I will agree with. gnome-desktop-environment terrifies me. It requires me to have an ungodly amount of packages installed that I will probably never use, but I don't dare remove the whole thing.
Yes, unfortunately, RPI has improved its name recognition by finding bullshit benchmarks like this one and satisfying their irrelevant criteria, rather than actually making the school better. Quality students and faculty may be attracted to the shiny statistics, but they won't stay without high quality campus life, professors, programs, and curriculum.
[re: MIT] Really the only rules regarding the network are (1) no switches, routers or hubs
Really, no hubs? What if you want to put more computers in your room than however many ports they give you?
Also, nobody requires students to run windows, in fact there is a large effort by the ACM and other groups to install linux.
Hooray for the ACM. I have a hundred times more respect for them than I do for the actual administration. Unfortunately they don't run the school. What bothers me is their willingness to extend the hegemony of Windows into the academic sphere. When they first started the laptop program, they said you can use a powerbook if you run Virtual PC on it. The current requirements don't even seem to allow that, AFAICT.
Dorms may be firewalled off, but it isn't restrictive like you claim, it just blocks incoming ssh, ftp and a few others.
When they implemented the firewall, it blocked all incoming connections. They later relaxed it so port 80 was unblocked for HTTP - all other ports and applications were still blocked. Has this changed?
And the problems with the RIAA came because RPI students wrote some amazing software for searching networks, further demonstrating the power of the RPI network.
Phynd is great and all, but I wouldn't exactly call it amazing. All it demonstrates is that the network works at all. I am not impressed on RPI's part. Do they defend their students, or just collaborate with the RIAA? That is the important test.
The only reason RPI is so high on the list is because the administration is a bunch of pandering suck-ups who will do whatever it takes to meet a trendy benchmark rather than actually earn respect the old fashioned way. RPI wants to be at the top of this list, so they excel at filling this requirements that Forbes is looking for. Yahoo does such a ranking, and for years RPI has been near the top of that list.
In reality, RPI's dorm network is a mess, they manditorily firewall off all students, and computer labs have disappeared because since 1999 they've required all students to have a laptop (and essentially required them to run windows). They've had among the worst problems with file sharing and the RIAA. Sure, there "is a" wireless network. Great. Ooh, and email access off campus! Too bad Rensselaer alumni free email for life is, as of this month, no longer.
Future Internet Deaths
Disclaimer: I didn't read the article.
But the original parent was comparing a Dell to a $1299 iMac G5, and finding that it costs $7 less than the Dell.
Now you're telling me I should consider the $1499 - as of today - PowerMac G5? I can only assume that Dell does not charge me $193 to drop the monitor from their configuration.